BlockTalks x UTU (Trust Infrastructure) AMA Transcript!
By: Block Talks
Tags: Blockchain, Blockchain Technology, Utu, Trust, Decentralization

Questions Asked on Twitter For UTU Team!

Q1. UTU Tokenomics is quite unique and may be difficult to compress in a short explanation but Can you explain the UTU Trust Token (UTT) and UTU Coin? its utility and features?

Ans — UTU Trust Token (UTT) measures the positive participation in the system. Trustworthiness is one aspect of this, which therefore should not be buyable, but can only be earned. Therefore UTT is really the heart of the protocol, but because it cannot be bought, it is not investable.

For the monetary aspects of the system, there is UTU Coin, which is a tradeable (ERC20 on Ethereum) token, and people are able to buy (and sell) it because it will be required for consuming our services.

Then, to further incentivise people to earn UTT, we want them to be able to convert it to UTU Coin to a limited extent. This will happen via an auction mechanism.

We are dedicated to the tokenization of trust. To create an economic model that optimizes the building of trust, we developed a two token ecosystem whose main purpose can be summarized as “Getting money out of trust,” meant both ways it could be interpreted. That is that one should NOT be able to buy digital trust but should be able to earn money from building trust.

Though there’s a complex game theoretical mechanism in place, the simplicity of these two high level objectives is what guide us and what we’d want people to take away.

Q2. In its development efforts, what does UTU think is the most proud of UTU? Could you please share more details about UTU’s development roadmap in the next 1–2 years?

Ans — I think the thing I’m most proud of is the team, partners, and community that have coalesced around a shared vision of a more trusted internet. I think the biggest step we’ve taken toward safeguarding that vision was the decision to decentralize the model and Bastian’s game theoretical brilliance to devise an economic model that solves for the economics of trust, beyond just delivering better trust technology.

On the technical side, I think the staked endorsement mechanism with its rewards and penalties, plus the auction conversion to UTU Coin, as outlined in the whitepaper, is really well designed. Of course it will have to prove itself in practive, but I think with some parameter tweaking this should work well.

I’m really looking forward to getting this released in production (currently alpha version on test net).

Q3. How UTU is building trust in DeFi portrays the problems that DeFi loans face with respect to overcollateralization, scams, and more? How your trust algorithms can improve credit scoring and trust in DeFi platforms?

Ans — The simple answer is: if you want to avoid overcollateralisation, you need some measure of trust. Because if the borrower defaults, there is some loss, even if you’re able to impose some penalties.

Traditional credit scoring looks only at past transaction histories. They might come from various places, but they’re only capturing a small part of the picture. For example, whether a farmer who borrows some money to buy seends for a particular plant for the first time will be successful, depends probably much more on their skill as farmer, whether that plant can grow well in the place where she is etc. than whether he paid back a loan for a car in time.

These kind of other parameters are what we call “context”, and our trust mechanism tries to evaluate that.

Q4. What are the ways that UTU generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model ? How can it make benefit win-win to both investors and your project?

Ans — UTU’s business model is essentially infrastructure as a service, whether that’s a centralized platform/marketplace/ecommerce/site/app etc querying our API (and paying for that query) or a decentralized service paying in UTU coins to query us. By making it pay per query we ensure its accessible to all size platforms and services.

Q5. What are the main markets that UTU is focusing now? What is your marketing strategy to access to these markets?

Ans — We think about markets more based on sectors than on geographies given that our core offerings are tech infrastructure which can be geographically agnostic to some extent. We think a lot about sectors though, mostly based on risk. To us, trust is the key corollary to risk. The more risk I feel, the more trust I need. So what are the things we feel the most risk about as people? our health, family, home, business, and assets, if a digital transaction exposes any of these things to risk, its a transaction that we can dramatically improve with better trust.

Our focus at the moment is deploying the service directly with a number of anchor partners (some announced, some still secret) and then making the service readily available across all the major ecosystems where people build product.