We launched UTU Protocol Testnet with great early traction; announced our integration with Chainlink and partnered with Qubism!

UTU Trust Guardians,

Welcome to the March 2022 edition of the UTU Update! Sorry it’s a few days late!

Read below to learn everything that’s been going on in the last month!

You can view the UTU Update in video form here:

TestNet Release

We launched testnet! There is a lot of uptake, we have more than 2,350 people who connected their Twitter or Telegram so far, and more than 1,350 for whom some of their contacts like Twitter followers or TG contacts also connected.

Have a quick look at the Day One social graph: 1,352 Nodes; 5,886 Relationships 👀

We did some sampling, and it looks like the majority are not bots!

We’re aware of the challenges that users experienced, and we’re welcoming all the feedback. We’re really thrilled to see so many people engaged in our Telegram group and Discord. We’ve already fixed a number of bugs, and are now working on fixing the remaining ones, making usability improvements and extending features.

We also encountered some issues with our clustering deployment. Because of the high uptake, we experienced some scaling issues and high latency with some of our backend services. Particularly our neo4j graph database which we use to track on chain interactions and social connections. We have improved the cluster setup to ensure high availability.

Ocean Hybrid Social/CF Recommender

The AI team has made significant progress on the hybrid social/collaborative recommender system for Ocean Market, working with UTU’s interactive data, Wallet addresses, data tokens transactions, and data asset, as well as the relationships between the transactional data.

NFT Contest Winners

We announced the winners of our NFT Contest and were super encouraged by the large volume of participation. Read this blog post for information about the contest winners. We learned that when you give people the opportunity to contribute in the mediums and forms in which they excel, they eagerly do so. It was super fulfilling for us and inspired a lot of ideas for how we can create even more avenues of engagement for more people of varying skills and expertises. 

Partnerships & Integrations

Chainlink

We also announced that the UTU Trust Token contract integrates a Chainlink oracle to track endorsement views, meaning which endorser saw which other users’ endorsements previously. This determines the UTT rewards in our protocol.

Remember that in UTU Protocol, users can stake UTT to endorse entities like services, providers or products on apps in the UTU ecosystem. Like for example DeFi Protocols in our DeFi Portal demo app. Let’s say you’re a fan of Compound, then you’re able to visit our DeFi Portal to stake some UTT on it to show that you trust it as a platform. These endorsements are used by our Trust API to deliver personalized recommendations to other visitors, particularly if they’re connected to you on Twitter, Telegram, of if you’ve previous transacted with their address that they connected to UTU.

And when you endorsed Compound, and then this other user sees that and then also endorses Compound, then we say your endorsement was successful and you’ll receive some UTT as a reward. So in effect this rewards useful contributions of feedback to the ecosystem.

And because the UTT contract can by itself not know who looked at whose endorsements before, we track that in our Trust API, and need the Chainlink Oracle so the UTT contract can get that info.

The basic mechanism is also described in our whitepaper, but we needed to update the formula to make it work simpler and more efficiently in Solidity. We’re going to release an update to our white paper with these updates soon, but in the meantime, you can also check out the utu-protocol Github where we open sourced the UTT contract repo, and a few others as well.

UTU Qubism

Qubism

We’ve partnered with Qubism!  Qubism is a cross-chain NFT marketplace where users can build their own 3D virtual reality (VR) art galleries. They will implement a super cool  feature, where users can show their NFT collections in a 3D VR museum and directly sell their NFTs globally. Users will be able to customize their own galleries without coding skills. 

By integrating the UTU Trust API into the Qubism marketplace, users will get personalized recommendations and ratings from similar collectors, buyers and sellers. The ability to add badges and video stories will further improve the quality of reviews on the platform.

The Trust API will allow Qubism to connect social platforms so that users can see what people in their circles think about sellers, buyers, artworks, and collectibles on the platform. 

Conclusion

Thanks for your support, Trust Guardians!

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