UTU Trust — Oasis Network AMA Session with Bastian Blankenburg and Jason Eisen
The Oasis Network “AMA Session” is a Q&A session, which happens virtually on the Oasis Network Community telegram group. This session has been designed to occasionally bring every community member up to speed on recent developments relating to the Oasis project, and also create an avenue where every member’s questions and doubts, could be addressed.
On February 23rd 2021, Oasis Protocol, conducted an AMA session on the community telegram group with UTU Trust. The UTU team which comprised of the Co-Founders of UTU, Bastian Blankenburg and Jason Eisen, were live at this online AMA Session, to provide community members with insights on UTU Trust, and how their recent partnership with Oasis Network would be of benefit to both projects.
In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into two segments; the first segment, provides full account of questions asked by the moderator of this AMA session, Jon Poole (highlighted in bold letters), while the second segment provides account of the questions asked by the community members during the session.
SEGMENT 1
Jon Poole — I’d like to welcome Jason, Bastian and Mike from the UTU team. Please, introduce yourselves to our community.
Bastian Blankenburg — Hi all, pleasure to be here!
I studied and did a PhD in computer science/distributed AI. This involved multiagent systems using game theory, risk models, trust models etc. It also involved building payment protocols that incentivised agents to adhere to the protocol, before blockchain came along. So nowadays one would use smart contracts for some of this, and I find it exciting which possibilities for distributed systems are now available.
Later worked in industry, then moved to Kenya because of private reasons. Met Jason who convinced me to join his startup, the taxi app MARAMOJA, because he had this great idea for a trust mechanism. That’s because the taxi sector had traditionally a lot of crime here, and people prefer known drivers. Then from that we spun off UTU, to make its own product of the trust mechanism.
Jon Poole — That’s really fascinating about the Taxi’s in Kenya because that really is a common misconception (or not) of the dangers you face there. As a Canadian that would be incredibly valuable to me. Amazing
Jason Eisen — Hi everyone! Great to be here indeed.
I’m Jason. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I grew up between Boston and Nashville. I spent 10 years in Washington DC, first at university at The American University (studied International Relations) then 7 years as a consultant for USAID, World Bank, and others. I started spending time in East Africa through that work in 2010 and moved to Kenya in 2013 to start (at the time) the first Taxi App anywhere in Africa, MARAMOJA. We realized in the process of building that taxi app that we were solving the wrong problem. we realized the problem was actually about Trust and began to focus our attention there, building better models of digital trust. This was the birth of UTU.
Jon Poole — Thank you, for joining us. Even with the power going out for you!
Mike Chan — Hi everyone, I’m Mike, the Chief Commercial Officer of UTU. Jason and Bastian are the stars of the show, so I’ll just jump in when needed!
Jon Poole — Thanks, for joining us Mike.
Jason Eisen — It turned it wasn’t just Kenya and it wasn’t just taxis that require better trust
Jon Poole — Who would have thought.
Bastian Blankenburg — Well it’s not like crimes in taxi happen every day, but there’s definitely a different risk profile here to some other places.
Jason Eisen — AMA by candelight and hotspot
Bastian Blankenburg — With IP over avian carrier?
Jon Poole — A late Valentines day candle lit AMA. Let’s dig in to some questions. Would you give us an overview of how UTU got started and what it is?
Jason Eisen — Sure, I can try that one.
UTU’s vision is to become the trust infrastructure of the entire internet. Our mission is to bridge the gap between how people trust in real life and how they are asked to trust online. We believe in a more human friendly internet, data as a human right, and the need to avoid digital trust dystopias as we’ve seen portrayed and played out in various contexts around the world. We provide trust infrastructure as a service to make the internet a safer more trusted place to gather, work, share, trade, etc.
Bastian Blankenburg — As mentioned, we developed the basic mechanism in our taxi app. It shows personal recommendations like “Your friend Paul likes this driver”. But we soon got requests from other platforms/apps all over the world, and realised that this should be its own product.
Jason Eisen — As I mentioned, we started first as an emphasis on trust within this taxi app and then discovered the power of what we were building and started to realized that platforms of all sorts, all over the world, had similar problems with trust
Bastian Blankenburg — Technically, we’re looking at who knows whom, and use some ML and other AI techniques to learn whom a user is likely to trust most for a recommendation, or any kind of feedback.
Jon Poole — Trust and Privacy within data share some very common issues. You don’t realize you need it until it’s too late.
Bastian Blankenburg — Well, I dare say we did realise this early on.
Jon Poole — Hence the gap in the market! UTU is all about increasing trust for the entire internet. What are the digital trust problems that currently exist and how are you solving them?
Jason Eisen — There are three core problems as I see it. Let me walk through them.
- Theory of trust — Digital trust currently is basically a legacy of what Ebay gave us in the 90s when we were just buying some collectibles and some aggregated, averaged, anonymous feedback was good enough. Meanwhile the whole internet has evolved around us and digital trust mechanisms have not. We abandon this one size fits all model of a universal scorecard for trust, and instead seek a descriptive model of trust, filtered by our own networks of trust and evaluated dynamically based on the options available…you could think about it like best fit vs. highest rating.
- Delivery mechanism — Trust has been hither to delivered as a product — either as a consumer-facing review platform (yelp, tripadvisor, google reviews, etc) or as an afterthought inside products (“let’s throw a 5 star system on it and call it a day”). But trust isn’t a product…its infrastructure. It should be delivered as such. We serve up our Trust Infrastructure via API/Oracle so platforms and marketplaces can consume them as infrastructure. This also eliminates that massive manipulation ability on consumer platforms where I can create limitless accounts and manipulate the trustworthiness of any product or service I want.
- The economics of digital trust — All of the economic incentives around digital trust are for the abuse/manipulation thereof. Fake reviews, bot armies, they all manipulate trust and tend to yield rewards for those that buy (and sell) such services. Meanwhile, good projects/people that only focus on value creation might languish on the side. We designed our token model to address both sides — to eliminate the ability to “buy Trust,” while creating a positive economic incentive to build trust — defined as facilitating good outcomes
Jon Poole — Thank you, for that detailed response. Who are UTU’s customers and what are some use cases for your technology?
Jason Eisen — Our customers are any sort of marketplace or platform for digital transactions, especially anywhere a user is exposed to risk. We tend to think about use cases based on risk; risk being the key corollary to trust. The more risk I feel, the more trust I want.
So what are the things we feel the most risk about? Our family, health, home, business, and assets. Any transaction that exposes any of these things to any sort of risk, is a transaction that UTU can improve
Jon Poole — What a use case! Let’s talk a little about the token, I see that UTU has a dual token model. Can you provide more insight into how that works?
Jason Eisen — Let me ask Bastian Blankenburg to take that one.
Bastian Blankenburg — Sure.
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. So UTT is really the heart of the protocol, but because it cannot be bought, and it is not investable.
For the monetary aspects of the system, there is UTU Coin, which is a tradeable (ERC20 on Ethereum, but will exist on other chains) token, and people should be 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.
Jon Poole — Incredible. What about one of the hottest sectors in Blockchain right now, DeFi. DeFi is obviously huge in crypto right now. What roles does UTU play in DeFi?
Bastian Blankenburg — There are several DeFi use cases of our mechanism, and a variant of it which determines creditworthiness. We actually wrote a whole concept note around this.
Jon Poole — Thank you, for sharing this.
Bastian Blankenburg — In short, it’s about enabling under-collateralised lending, and trust in basic DeFi infrastructure.
While blockchain enable trustless execution of smart contracts, whether a user trusts the protocol design, auditors, UI etc. of a DeFi app is another question. We also have our own DeFi Portal d-app which helps with this latter issue.
Jon Poole — Something that many people are very excited for in DeFi. under-collateralised loans.
Bastian Blankenburg — (currently in its MVP version, will get an update with the full UTU recommendations soon)
Jon Poole — I’m sure our community is very eager to understand this so I have to ask. Would you talk about how UTU and Oasis will work together on this partnership?
Bastian Blankenburg — Sure.
Jason Eisen — As a bit of context, a big part of our vision is the elevation of privacy from a setting to a feature.
Bastian Blankenburg — We can both benefit from each other. In our mechanism, we want to enable users to exactly specify which services — including UTU’s own — might use which of their data, for which purpose, and which privacy and anonymity constraints, and earn some UTT from this in the process.
Oasis provides some of the required underlying privacy-preserving data provision infrastructure, so this an easy fit. But UTU can also help Oasis’ users to make informed choices e.g. about which data from others to trust etc.
Jon Poole — Our Differential Privacy, our ability to tokenize data and our shared views on taking on the modern internet make us a perfect fit.
Mike Chan — Another big use case is that UTU’s credit scoring models can be used by DeFi apps built on Oasis to facilitate undercollateralized lending
Bastian Blankenburg — Indeed! As mentioned before, trust and data privacy are deeply linked.
Jon Poole — This is HUGE. Our ecosystem is getting stronger and stronger. Lastly, before I open up the chat to the community. What are some of the ways our community can follow you?
Jason Eisen — Folks can join us in our Telegram
Mike Chan — Don’t forget Twitter.
SEGMENT 2
Brandon A (Community Question) —How well can the confidential computational code modularize its use of SGX so it can be easily replaced if something better comes along? If UTU and/or Oasis members want to chime in, go ahead?
Bastian Blankenburg —Personally, I like to avoid SGX and rely more on 0k-proofs and multiparty computation for our mechanism. However for some use cases it might be inevitable to use it, but we will need to look into the details when it gets to that point.
Jon Poole (Community Question)— I’ve got a question. How does UTU view Privacy first features versus Privacy as a setting?
Jason Eisen — To me it’s about the care and effort put into the interfaces. They should be as beautiful and enjoyable, easy to use as any other aspect of a product
Bastian Blankenburg — As mentioned, we want users to be able to specify exactly how any of their data can be used or to whom it can be shown under which conditions. This is a privacy-first design, because every bit our protocol has privacy concerns and controls.
Technically, there will be some settings which users have to use to specify their own needs, but we’re in the process of getting some research together with the UKRI TAS (Trusted Autonomous Systems) Hub started to figure out how to do this the right way. i.e. even if we want to give users complete control, it has to be understandable and usable by non-techie / non-privacy expert users!
Jon Poole — Encapsulating specific sets of data for third party use is where Oasis stands alone from the competition.
Bastian Blankenburg — Exactly, that’s why we’re looking so forward to working with you guys.
Jon Poole — User interface is going to be everything when it comes to revolutionizing the way our modern systems are used today. If it’s not simple and attractive we won’t gain attention from those who have a challenge using technology.
Jason Eisen — Yes, and the burden is on actors such as us to make interfaces that meet people where they’re comfortable rather than expecting them to come to us.
Jon Poole — Mass adoption included all those people right now who don’t fully understand what Blockchain is, so we both have our work cut out for us with taking on the modern way of doing things!
Bastian Blankenburg — Oh yes, there’s a lot to be done particularly on d-apps/blockchain. However for some, this might mean giving more control easier rather than making all the choices for users.
Jon Poole — Beautiful vision that we at Oasis are so proud to be a part of. Thank you, very much UTU Team for joining us this morning for an amazing AMA!
Bastian Blankenburg — Thanks a lot, it’s a pleasure to be here, and looking really forward to this collab!
Jason Eisen — Thanks for having us!
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