Shiftmovementdigital AMA with UTU

Hey Mike. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us over here at Shift Movement Digital. We are excited to have you in for this AMA. I have been following UTU for a while now and am looking forward to all that you have planned. I wanted to take some time to talk with you so others can learn more about your company.

Shift Movement Digital: Before we get started, can you tell us a little about who you are and what you do for UTU?

“I am Mike, and I’m the Chief Commercial Officer of UTU. I’m responsible for the entire business side of running UTU — Sales, BD, Marketing, Customer Success, and crypto initiatives like exchange listings, liquidity, and more. It’s an amazing role that fits me perfectly, and I love it.

On the more personal side, I live in Washington DC with my wife, 6-year old daughter Maya and 14-year old dog daughter Sweet Dee.”

Shift Movement Digital: Thank you. How and when did you get into cryptocurrency?

Mike: Back in 2013, I was learning to code, and I took an online course that was taught by Balaji Srinivasan (ex CTO of Coinbase, investor at a16z, etc.). He taught us how to build a simple online crypto wallet, and we had to buy a little bit of Bitcoin from Coinbase for our wallet. Bitcoin was at $90 at that time — I wish I bought more!

Anyway, I can’t say that I fully jumped all-in right away, as I was focused on building my tech startup back then. But a couple of years later, I started digging deeper and learning more about Bitcoin, and then Ethereum and other projects, I learned about the tech, started investing more often, telling my friends about it, and just kept learning from there.

Shift Movement Digital: That is a great story. I think about similar stories I have talking to my professors who knew about Bitcoin or have affiliations with Coinbase.

Shift Movement Digital: How was UTU created?

Mike: UTU was spawned from a ride-hailing app called MARAMOJA, of which our co-founders Jason Eisen and Bastian Blankenburg were founders of as well.

MARAMOJA was the first ride-hailing app in Africa and it was doing well. But Jason and Bastian realized that the Uber model, where riders and drivers were essentially interchangeable commodities, didn’t quite fit the way their users behaved. They discovered that the decision of a rider selecting a driver (and vice versa) was based on trust and familiarity. So from that use case, they started building the trust mechanism and design that UTU is today.

Shift Movement Digital: I love the concept behind UTU and the problem you are trying to fix. For those that are not familiar, what does UTU mean? What is UTU, and why is it important?

Mike: UTU means “humanity” in Swahili, reflecting the human-centered, real-world model of trust that we’re building for the online world.

UTU is the trust infrastructure of the internet that helps businesses and consumers engage and transact in an easier, safer, and more trustworthy way.

Our AI-based API products collect and analyze data to create trust signals and personalized recommendations that help consumers and businesses make the best decisions for their situation. And the UTU blockchain protocol rewards users for trustworthy actions and compensates them for sharing their data while protecting their privacy.

UTU changes the economics of trust, ensures trust can’t be bought or manipulated and leverages data to help people make better decisions.

UTU is important because so many things we do — purchases, selecting a baby sitter, finding new employees — any decision that involves risk is based on trust.

Shift Movement Digital: We noticed you recently updated the roadmap in February. Can you tell us a bit about what has been finalized already and what the rest of this year looks like?

Mike: The roadmap needs to be updated a little bit, primarily because we just announced a big partnership with Ocean Protocol, where we’ll be integrating our trust infrastructure to increase the trust of their data marketplace, Ocean Market.

Our trust infrastructure will ingest the activity of data providers, data consumers, datasets, and other entities to build comprehensive profiles for these. Ocean users will be able to rate and review each of these entities. All of this data will be dynamically analyzed to create a trust signal for each entity.

We have a set, detailed timeline to build all of this by the end of the year for both the Ethereum and Polygon networks. And what’s amazing is that we were going to build all of this anyway, so this is going to significantly accelerate our product development, and the Ocean Protocol Foundation is funding it! So this will be a win-win for all.

So that’s an important part of the roadmap. We’ll also be launching our Creditworthiness API very soon, which will provide better credit assessment for both traditional and decentralized finance. We’ll announce the UTU protocol testnet and mainnet by the end of the year, extend our Trust API and SDKs to more platforms (namely Android and iOS), and much more.

Shift Movement Digital: Great announcement you all just had. The Ocean and UTU partnership is essential.

Shift Movement Digital: Explain tokenizing trust for people that do not understand this concept.

Mike: The tokenization is really about changing the incentives of trust.

Right now, there aren’t many trust incentives for product purchasers and users. You buy a product, and if you like it, maybe you’ll write a review, but probably not, right? You’re more likely to write a review if you don’t like the product. The incentive to write a review and state your opinion just isn’t there.

Now, if you look at the businesses selling these products, they have a massive incentive to make sure their product and services are rated positively. These ratings and endorsements can literally make or break a company. So what happens? They pay for fake reviews, they hire bot farms, and do all these shady things to get 4.5 stars on Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor.

UTU tokenizes trust and creates a new economic model that incentivizes trustworthy actions.

There are two tokens in our ecosystem.

First, there’s UTU Trust Token (UTT), which is really the measure of trustworthiness and positive participation in the system. Like trust, UTT can’t be bought and only earned. You can use UTT to endorse products you’ve bought, sellers you purchased from, freelancers or companies you’ve worked with, or any other entity. If someone else hired this freelancer based on your endorsement, and had a positive experience, you get rewarded with more UTT. On the other hand, if you endorse someone who turned out to be terrible, you get punished and have UTT taken away.

You can also earn UTT by contributing your data to the protocol, in a privacy-preserving way, of course.

For the monetary aspects of the system, there is UTU Coin, which is a tradeable token, and people can buy and sell it because it will be required for consuming our services like our API products and other products that we’re building.

Then, to further incentivize people to earn UTT, users are able to convert UTT to UTU Coins to a limited extent. This will happen via an auction mechanism.

So you can see how tokenization changes the economics of trust incentivizes more trustworthy behavior.

Shift Movement Digital: Thank you for explaining the difference between UTU and UTT. The concept behind both is essential.

In America, credit is essential when it comes to lending. How can UTU help from a lending and Financing standpoint?

Mike: We have a Creditworthiness API product launching very soon that leverages AI and our social model of trust to better assess creditworthiness. This model can take in on- and off-chain data to create a living, breathing, dynamic creditworthiness assessment that adapts to new data. This can help traditional lenders increase loan volume and decrease defaults, and DeFi platforms to provide undercollateralized loans, which is going to be absolutely massive.

Right now, most credit scores are done with a simple scorecard based on past credit history. The majority of the world just doesn’t have enough credit history to be approved for most loans, yet they may be very qualified based on their job, their payment history, trust within their networks, and other factors that just don’t get considered by lenders most of the time.

So our Creditworthiness API is going to solve all of these problems and help the under- and unbanked get loans and grow economies around the world. It’s gonna be really big and I’m excited to get it out there soon.

Shift Movement Digital: I love it! You all are focusing on the unbanked which is important too.

Shift Movement Digital: Manipulation is a big thing. How can you assure the reviews created are accurate?

Mike: There are millions of fake reviews out there. TrustPilot removed over 2.2 million fake reviews last year, and Amazon is working on removing millions of fake reviews as well.

We can’t guarantee that every review written in the UTU ecosystem will be accurate. But what our protocol does is make sure that the accurate ones are identified, recommended, and rise to the top, and their authors rewarded, while the inaccurate and fake reviews are pushed down to the bottom of the pile and their authors punished.

It’s this incentive system that will increase the accuracy of reviews and hence trust.

Shift Movement Digital: What are some of your recent partnerships, and what does the future with these partnerships look like?

Mike: As mentioned before, we just partnered with Ocean Protocol to integrate our trust infrastructure into Ocean Market. And we’ve partnered with AMPnet, HYVE, CryptoTask, and others to do the same.

We’ve partnered with other blockchains such as Elrond, Polygon, Harmony, Oasis, Kardiachain, Meter, and others to deploy our trust infrastructure so Dapps built on these chains can easily integrate UTU.

We envision an interoperable world where UTU is easily implemented into Dapps and trust-flows freely across chains.

Shift Movement Digital: This is important. Great partnerships you all have so far. We are excited to see the future with UTU.

Shift Movement Digital: Is or will staking be a part of UTU?

Mike: Staking UTT on entities to show that you trust them is an integral part of how our ecosystem works.

We are also looking at ways to stake UTU Coin for rewards, and more news will come about that soon.

Shift Movement Digital: UTU sounds like it has found an untapped market. How has the demand been so far for your company?

Mike: Demand has been great. We are currently integrating our Trust API with about ten pilot partners, with many more in the pipeline. And the demand from blockchain protocols to partner with us to deploy our trust infrastructure has been high as well.

Everyone realizes the importance of trust for so many use cases, and we have a unique solution to the problem.

Shift Movement Digital: You are finishing up Q2 for 2021. What has been finalized, and what are you looking forward to in Q3 2021.

Mike: We will launch our Creditworthiness API very soon, and we are very excited about that. Q3 will be primarily focused on the Ocean integration and building out our testnet.

Shift Movement Digital: An important thing in America is convenience. Explain how people can benefit from a convenience standpoint with UTU (delivery, streaming, ridesharing, etc.)

Mike: Because UTU recommends the best products and services based on a user’s preferences and context, it will be much more convenient and easier to make purchase decisions online. Gone are the days of scrolling through hundreds of products and thousands of reviews — our recommendation engine will surface the best solutions.

Shift Movement Digital: Where can people buy UTU?

Mike: UTU Coin can be purchased on Uniswap v3, PancakeSwap, Bibox, and Hotbit.

Shift Movement Digital: So, we must ask, are there any plans for future exchange listings?

Mike: We can’t comment on exchange listings, but we are always looking for the best ways to increase the liquidity of UTU Coin. Stay tuned.

Shift Movement Digital: Ah man, we thought we could get some more announcements. The growth in terms of exchanges you have made so far is impressive. We will lookout for new exchange listings.

Shift Movement Digital: Is there a timeline for when the 2022 roadmap will be released?

Mike: We are working on editing the 2021 roadmap now, and the 2022 roadmap will be released later this year.

Thanks, Mike, for taking the time to speak with us. I know I have learned a lot more from listening to you as will many others.