UTU is the trust infrastructure of web3. If you’ve not been following us in detail, let’s get you caught up with all things UTU tokenomics and roadmap. You can (mostly) follow the thread from these historical posts from April 2021 and October 2021, summarized and updated below. You’ll note some key changes in the model since then which are detailed in this blog post which also links to our updated white paper. 

Get a snack, let’s do this. We’re gonna get you all up to speed on UTU’s past, present, and future as the trust infrastructure of the internet. 

Tokenomics – A quick Refresher

UTU Protocol has two tokens – UTU Trust Token (UTT) is a non-tradeable, non-purchasable Reputation Token that represents a user’s useful contribution to trust on the internet. Users can stake their UTT-denominated reputation on domains, subdomains, tokens, and blockchain addresses as a show of confidence in those assets, entities, and services. 

UTU Coin ($UTU) is a freely tradeable ERC20 Utility Token on Ethereum Mainnet, BNB, Optimism, Polygon, and NEAR. It is used to govern access to trust signals from the UTU Trust API, and will play a key role in UTU protocol governance in the future. The Infographic below explains the token model in more detail.

$UTU Coin Metrics

UTU Protocol provisions for 1 billion $UTUs broken into three pools, designated for Treasury (400M), Team/Advisors (300M), and Ecosystem Growth (300M). Below we summarize the state of these $UTU Pools as of February 2024 and the expected use of these coin pools over the coming year as we round out protocol development and begin to shift our focus to ecosystem growth and user acquisition. 

UTU Treasury Pool – Originally 400M $UTUs

To fund development and operations to date, UTU Protocol has sold 158,143,277 $UTUs in our initial Token Sale and subsequent OTC deals. We remain with a balance of 241,856,723 $UTUs that we will use to continue funding development. Treasury will be primarily spent in two ways going forward:

Team Pay

Historically UTU has paid its team in USD and Kenya Shillings meaning that we’ve needed to sell $UTU for fiat to pay salaries every month. With the growth of UTU Protocol now imminent, UTU’s co-founders Jason and Bastian have both moved to taking 100% of their compensation in $UTU, watch their wallets at JasonEisen.eth and databu.eth. Much of the team have also switched to majority $UTU compensation, a further display of belief and commitment to the cause. With no plans among us to sell our $UTUs anytime soon, downward pressure on price from team salaries will be greatly reduced going forward. Since these $UTUs to be paid to the team replace our normal fiat salaries they’ll be pulled from the UTU Treasury Wallet and not subject to lockups though I don’t expect anyone to be liquidating much at all, as we are all true believers and in it for the long haul. 

OTC Token Sales

To ensure these $UTUs don’t cause excessive downward pressure on the $UTU price, we are moving all our future OTC sales to the Frictionless platform which enables our community to buy $UTUs safely, in almost any quantum, without impacting the price. Furthermore, we will offer $UTUs for sale at discounted prices in some cases, where buyers agree to special lockups enabled by Frictionless, helping us generate additional fiat to cover expenses while demonstrating the strength and belief of the $UTU hodling community. One of our Trust Guardians has committed to a $2k monthly OTC buy that will help us acquire various fiat-denominated services. We’ll make some additional announcements soon on how you can start buying $UTU on Frictionless! 

Team & Advisors Pool – Originally 300M $UTUs

The $UTU Team & Advisor Pool originally comprised 100M Advisor Tokens and 200M Team Tokens. These serve as the primary economic incentives for our team to continue working toward UTU’s mission and vision. 

Vesting for Team Tokens: Starts 1 year after Protocol launch, then monthly over 24 months. UTU protocol MainNet launched on September 29, 2022. Therefore monthly vesting for the team should have started on September 29, 2023, though we’ve been delayed in implementing this, aside from a 1.1M $UTU team bonus last year. We need to start unlocking these team tokens though and will be setting up these vesting contracts soon on Sablier, so our community can monitor them. You may take the fact that we’re about 6 months behind on doing this as evidence of our team’s priorities around product and growth as opposed to token grabs. We’ll get around to this at some point though…

Vesting for Advisor Tokens – UTU made a number of commitments to Advisors in the early days that we have honored over the last couple years with the unlocking (to date) of ~104M $UTUs. Our unlockings from the Team and Advisor pool were initiated on a somewhat irregular schedule. This wasn’t helped by the sometimes long time that it took to get all signatures for the unlock txs together, often caused by ledger support in wallets breaking now and again. This led to larger unlocks for our advisors accumulating, and at some point an error where we ended up unlocking the equivalent of 2 monthly payouts too much. However we haven’t sent these tokens anywhere, and will use them according to the existing allocation of the pool. To prevent further unlocking confusion, we’re looking to utilize vesting contracts going forward as mentioned above.

Sadly a number of our advisors and early buyers were not the Trust Guardians they represented themselves to be and have dumped significant portions of their tokens causing some of the downward price action we’ve seen, and creating some great buying opportunities for the real trust guardians. Turns out not everyone in crypto stands by their words. UTU chose to honor our commitments even in these cases. 

UTU Ecosystem Growth Pool – 300M $UTUs

The Ecosystem Growth Pool has two main purposes, 1) to pay out $UTU Rewards generated by successful endorsements on UTU protocol, and 2) to build the ecosystem of UTU Partners, communities, and trust guardians globally in line with our efforts to decentralize our token ownership, safeguard and advance the mission of UTU, and grow our market penetration. A portion of $UTU denominated revenues generated from the UTU Trust API will always go back to the ecosystem growth pool to replenish the supply of $UTU rewards to be paid out.

$UTU Rewards

$UTU Rewards are the heart of UTU protocol – an economic incentive to build trust online. $UTU rewards are paid out to UTU protocol contributors whose feedback and UTT endorsements help facilitate good outcomes for others – i.e. that helps folks from your network understand which things to interact with online, and which things are best avoided. $UTU Rewards will only be claimable by protocol participants who have satisfied the whitelisting requirements described below. 

Ecosystem Growth

Bounties

UTU launched our first bounties program late last year in tandem with our first ever UTU protocol hackathon – part of the ETHSafari 2023 hackathon. Initial bounties to become available will be focused on expanding the number of social connectors (e.g. telegram, twitter, etc.) on UTU. We’ll be launching our bounty program on Charmverse, a decentralized Notion that the UTU team is falling in love with. 

Social Connectors

The UTU Protocol Documentation details the full process to integrate web 2 and web 3 identity and social networks into UTU. Each social network that a user connects, earns them UTT to start making endorsements with and establishes their network from which we’ll source signal to show them. At the moment only telegram is there but we’re mobilizing team and community assets as we speak to rapidly scale this component. 

Signal Integrations

Signals from your network are the foundation of UTU of course, but we recognize that other forms of trust are also important. We’ve built the UTU protocol to be expandable such that developers can integrate other types of signal from other sources into UTU and serve it up to users alongside native UTU signals. This could include smart contract audits and analyzers as well as custom metrics based on the type of asset being considered, and others. A keen dev may decide to integrate signal from coinmarketcap or chainalysis or any other source of signal. A startup may choose to integrate their own signals into UTU’s infrastructure as a channel to market for distribution of their own signals. In addition to new signal streams, we’ll offer bounties to developers who can improve current signal streams either by computing useful metrics from existing data that help instill trust or by improving the presentation of signal in terms of language, especially for the summary signal that is shown before the detailed signal. 

UTU on New Networks

The future is multi-chain, and so is UTU. UTU Protocol is currently live on Ethereum MainNet ($UTU Coin only), Polygon, Optimism, BNB, and Near. In time, we’d wish to extend UTU to all major protocols and ecosystems – decentralized and centralized. For EVM compatible blockchains, UTU has developed scripts that allow us to quickly and easily deploy UTU protocol. For non-EVM compatible ecosystems, the process is a bit more complex and the affiliated bounties will reflect this in the size of the bounties available.

Project-based Grants

Conditions permitting, UTU will launch in Q4 a project-based grants program, to fund developers building on UTU that align to our core goals and targets for the year. Project based grants, given the downward pressure they can exert on token price in the short term, will be limited in size and scope with expansions of the program based on user growth and token price/liquidity. 

Subsidies for API/SDK Integrators

We recognize that the imposition of a paywall on UTU signals could have a constraining effect on growth and potentially create frustration among users if there is limited signal on UTU that actually helps inform their decisions as will inevitably be the case in the early days. To overcome this, we are looking to develop a subsidy program where UTU protocol partners that integrate the UTU Trust API/SDK can qualify for user subsidies to cover the cost of accessing UTU signals for some initial user base and time period. We think this path is preferable to leaving the Trust API without a paywall as establishing the precedent of users paying a small amount of $UTU to see signal will help acclimatize the market to this new model of trust. 

Retroactive Grants

Inspired by the Optimism RPGF, UTU intends to launch a Retroactive Grants program next year. We’d love community feedback on this but currently planning to split the grants program into four work streams:

Attention – Get more eyeballs on UTU, measurable by follows of our accounts, views of our content, and otherwise exposure of UTU to the world. 

Activation – Get more humans on UTU, measurable by new wallets connecting to UTU and connecting their socials.

Action – Get more content on UTU, measurable by UTT reputation endorsements made and other feedback left.

Amplification – Extend the functionality and reach of UTU, measurable by code contributions to UTU’s github repos, the deployment of products that make UTU better, help it reach new communities, or otherwise advance progress toward our mission.   

More information about the UTU Retro Grants program will be available later this year but we expect to commit a substantial portion of our treasury to this initiative.

Roadmap

UTU has a clear roadmap for the coming year that spans product, growth, and decentralization goals. You can always check out and comment on our public roadmap.

Product

Our Product roadmap can be further divided into core protocol capabilities, the Trust API and SDK as the key point of access for B2B integrations, and our consumer applications including the UTU Trust Browser Extension and UTU Trust Snap for MetaMask.

Protocol

The development of UTU protocol over the past several years has been slow and steady, with the full system coming into view finally and all major remaining components slated for completion this year, marking a key milestone in our progress and the beginning of shift towards user acquisition and growth.

Disapprovals and Edits to UTT Reputation endorsements

We’ve thus far implemented most of the components of our feedback system including star ratings, badges, video reviews, text reviews, and UTT endorsements. Sadly life isn’t always sunny though and neither is the internet. Sketchy people, shady projects, scams, tricks, traps, and other schemes to part you from your hard-earned cash pervade the internet. Recognizing this, and integral to UTU protocol, is the ability for a user to disapprove of something as much as to endorse it.  

The economics of disapproval work slightly differently though, requiring the user to actually burn (not stake) some of their UTT-denominated reputation to disapprove of something. Building on successful similar concepts such as stack overflow, this fee helps ensure that disapprovals are not done antagonistically or sprayed across the network. While we believe vehemently that building positive trust should earn you revenue, we don’t believe that folks should be able to economically benefit from disapproving of things – that is UTU protocol pays rewards when positive endorsements help others transact successfully but UTU protocol does NOT pay $UTU rewards for disapprovals that help people avoid scams. It would be almost impossible to implement such a system (based on actions not taken) and we tend to think that keeping your friends and family safe from scams is intrinsic incentive enough to flag these things as scams with UTT-denominated disapprovals.

We are also finalizing a user’s ability to make changes to a previously staked endorsement, i.e. to increase, reduce, or remove a UTT stake you’ve previously made. With these two functions implemented (within Q1), the core of UTU protocol will be complete.

Paywalls with Revenue Shares

Access to UTU Trust Signals has been free up to now, meaning the $UTU economic model has not been fully spinning as the requirement to pay some amount of $UTU to see signals is the persistent buy pressure that creates and sustains demand for $UTU over time. We are super excited to be finalizing development and testing of this capability currently, in collaboration with Unlock protocol. Expect a testnet release of this very soon.

Bringing all Review content on-chain

Currently only UTT endorsements are stored on-chain, with video reviews, text reviews, star ratings, and badges, stored on a centralized server and called via oracle. We aim to bring all forms of review content on-chain this year to make the system even more decentralized and transparent. 

Whitelisting

UTU protocol’s economics depend in part on ensuring that only real people (humans) can earn $UTU coin rewards. If bots were to be able to access and act with impunity in UTU protocol, the economic model would surely break under the strain of bot-scaled usage and pressures. To address this challenge, an effective proof of personhood is required to whitelist users that should be eligible to claim $UTU rewards. We are exploring various whitelisting mechanism and platforms including World ID (tools for humanity), Next ID, Gitcoin Passport, traditional KYC tools, and others. More information will be forthcoming on this over the next several months. 

Account Abstraction

UTU is web3 native but your parents and grandparents surely aren’t. If you’re reading this, we probably agree that at some point in the future web 3 will simply be the web with the entirety of the digital world moving toward web3 concepts and architectures over the decade – but that’s a ways away. In the interim, integration of key technologies like account abstraction and web3 auth can simplify the user experience massively and help UTU transcend web3 to make its mark across the legacy internet as well. For a regular person, imagine the ease and simplicity of interacting with UTT as ‘points’ and $UTU as a cash equivalent. 

The value proposition of UTU becomes obvious across the entire internet – a global trust system to replace all the review platforms (trust pilot, google reviews, trip advisor) and internal feedback systems (amazon reviews, etc.) with a system that:

• Can’t be manipulated 
• Creates an economic incentive to help others find good things and avoid scams
• Curates signal based on your relationships and context of the transaction

Privacy 

The construction of UTU leaves some important questions about privacy. For example, there may be signal/feedback you’d wish to leave but only if the audience for that signal could be limited to a certain subset of people. Or perhaps you’d like to endorse a specialized doctor that treated you well but don’t really want the whole world to know that you had/have a certain condition. With differential privacy mechanisms like K-anonymity, this type of privacy can be preserved without sacrificing trust. We’ll begin work on these privacy mechanisms toward the latter half of the year and next year.

Governance

With the vast majority of UTU protocol built, and core products built atop UTU launching, we are excited to launch in earnest our governance model as part of our next phases of decentralization. Over time, we expect more and more decision-making to fall under governance but we’ll start with grant funding allocations and roadmap prioritization on our path to full governance of the $UTU reward function and UTT endorsement smart contract. Our resident governance guru, Bastian (fun fact: Bastian was one of the early liquid democracy proponents in the German Pirate Party) is on the case and you can bet he will be sharing his more detailed thoughts with you all soon.

Browser Extension

The UTU Trust Browser Extension is our flagship consumer product, currently available in open beta with limited functionality. Robust user testing over the past several months have helped us make huge advances in the product’s architecture, stability, user experience, and feature set. When it comes out of beta (soon), it will enable users to leave and view signals about any domain, webpage, or blockchain address as they surf the web. It’s a bit like community notes (on Twitter, now X), but for the entirety of web3 including blockchain addresses as much as web domains. The pace of iteration and feature development should increase rapidly as we build onward from a stable foundation.

Snap

Congrats on reading this far, you get the first-ever access to the UTU Trust Snap! The UTU Trust Snap (on Polygon Mumbai Test Net) integrates UTU’s capabilities directly into your MetaMask (currently only for MetaMask flask though – a developer-focused version of MetaMask). We are actively working toward getting UTU integrated into the main MetaMask wallet to enable users to get UTU signal at just the right time when they’re about to send tokens or connect their wallet to a dApp, and need that extra bit of confidence to pull the trigger. Please note, that UTU’s testnet is exactly that, a testnet for UTU devs and the larger developer community integrating or building on UTU protocol. This means that it goes down from time to time as updates are made and systems upgraded.

API/SDK Docs

As much as UTU is trust system designed and built for people, we have long believed that integration with sites, apps, and dApps as a complement to or replacement for their existing internal feedback and review mechanisms is a key part of UTU’s growth strategy. We released our updated API/SDK Docs recently and are in the process of simplifying and improving them based on feedback from our already vibrant community of developers, that we are supporting through our new initiative discussed below, UTU Studios. Look for UTU to start showing up embedded in some of your favorite products around web3!

The Trust API is the key access point to all of the rich recommendation content, reviews, star ratings, badges, and reputation endorsements across UTU protocol. The SDK provides a standard set of visual components to easily serve all this great feedback content up to your users transparently based on their personal networks, even if they’re not connected to your dApp. Any junior dev can integrate UTU into your product in a Snap. :0

Growth

As the bull market charges and many new market entrants begin to awaken to the opportunity and potential of a decentralized web, UTU will be there with the right products launching into the market to keep users safe as they explore the bounties of web3. Timing is everything, they say. We split our growth efforts into a two main baskets: Direct and Catalytic Growth initiatives.

Direct Growth Activities

The first basket comprises many of the typical approaches to digital marketing with content and social media, though you can bet we’ll always look for ways to inject our UTU style into these campaigns. We’re not so big on ads though, and given the social nature of UTU protocol we are far more inclined to run socially-centered campaigns that drive growth through organic approaches to value creation using UTU protocol, UTT endorsements, and $UTU rewards to build trust sector by sector. This will also include plenty of partnerships with brands contribute to or distribute UTU signal, improve user experience, and scale up content on UTU protocol. We are particularly interested in partnerships with browsers, exchanges, and wallets that can integrate UTU signal directly into users broad-based experience of surfing the web and interacting with tokens, dapps, NFTs and more.

Catalytic Growth Activities

Catalytic growth activities can be further broken down into the various Ecosystem Growth initiatives and grant programs described above as well as new initiatives, such as UTU Studios and UTU Trust Guardian Communities described below.

UTU Studios

In addition to typical marketing and sales activities, which you’ll start to see a lot more of with the consumer products launching, we’re very excited to announce the launch of UTU Studios to help drive UTU protocol into the market via consulting and incubation/acceleration of projects that integrate UTU or contribute to our progress toward our vision. UTU Studios is an effort to formalize our support to the various projects that build on UTU, create new revenue streams, and encourage more projects to build on UTU. Some of the projects UTU that are currently part of UTU Studios:

MaraMoja – This is where it all started. Jason and Bastian co-founded MaraMoja back in 2013 as Africa’s first taxi app, read the UTU Origins blog post from 2020 for more history.  Today they have 50,000 taxi drivers across Kenya and hundreds of thousands of users that are supported by UTU Trust signals inside the taxi app that help users choose the driver that they feel most safe with. With their recent incredible growth in the school transport sector, their high trust value proposition is even more critical to their success.

Africa Defi Alliance/Labs (ADA/L) – UTU, along with a group of Africa-based DeFi proponents and industry stakeholders, instigated the Africa DeFi Alliance and Labs in 2022 as a pair of interwoven DAOs, to advance the functionality, relevance, accessibility, awareness and utilization of decentralized finance to transform working capital markets for African MSMEs. UTU’s position has always been that creditworthiness is a specialized form of trust and accordingly built a suite of tools (the UTU Creditworthiness API and Mpesa APIs) which have been used to facilitate nearly 15,000 loans worth $2.2M to 1,500 micro, small, and medium enterprises in Kenya and Rwanda with default rates below 1%. UTU charges between $0.1 to $0.5 per API query to assess creditworthiness of ADA Borrowers in addition to ADL protocol fees of 0.5% on all pass through volume. ADA Pilots to date have spanned mobility, informal retail, and informal foodsellers, reducing their cost of capital by up to 10X in some cases. We are incredibly excited about what the Africa Defi Alliance will do in 2024.

Trustify – Trustify is an UTU-powered on-chain freelancer marketplace. Long-known to be one of the most high value sectors we could penetrate, gig work platforms are rife with fraud and manipulation – a burden we’ve faced ourselves and has often kept us from using such platforms. We’ve also announced similar collaborations in the past with other projects pursuing similar goals, though they sadly didn’t make it through the winter. We’re super optimistic about Trustify though and can’t wait for their first release so you can see UTU in action in the gig economy.

Symbiont – Symbiont is a social media platform that has a chrome extension that allows one to create a comment thread leading off any web page on the internet. Symbiont has the concept of self censorship built into the platform. In order for the system to not be abused we need to know whether someone who tags content as being unacceptable is a real person who is trusted by others. For this purpose Symbiont integrates with UTU trust which gives us the reassurance that the person tagging content is trusted by people in our networks.

Web 3 Guardian – Among the winners of our hackathon last September, Web 3 Guardian has built a telegram bot to extend the reach and capabilities of UTU directly into your telegram app. You’ll be able to query the UTU trust API to get signal about any user on telegram just by typing /utu! We’re supporting this great team to bring this product to market soonest.

Antugrow – Antugrow is the latest effort by East African Blockchain OG Eddie Kago. Antugrow is building credit models for farmers that directly connect and plug into UTU’s work with the Africa Defi Alliance. We’re currently cooking up another pilot, that demonstrate the vastly scalable and transformative impact of DeFi for agricultural working capital across Africa. 

Other Projects/Clients – UTU team members are supporting other clients with specialized AI, Blockchain, and software development expertise as part of our efforts to grow the ecosystem and generate additional revenue. There’s even a fortune 500 company in the mix…can’t wait to say more 🙂 Have a project that you need help from UTU Studios? Don’t be shy to reach out in the UTU telegram group or discord communities.

Trust Guardian Communities 

We’ve been actively thinking about and discussing how to effectively decentralize UTU and further our growth goals through endowments of UTU coins to global web 3 and developer communities. We see communities such as Space Ya Tech and Safari DAO in East Africa which are values aligned to UTU and comprise large cohorts of stakeholders who could demonstrably improve our global market position, as a critical part of our global expansion and decentralization efforts.  We are starting to explore other communities around the world where we could make $UTU coin endowments that will balance global token holdings as we launch full protocol governance via $UTU Coin. We will make some announcements in Q2 around how communities and DAOs around the world can apply to become trust guardian communities.

Conclusion

There’s a LOT going on at UTU to bring to life the trust infrastructure of the next internet. 2024 is looking like the year that it all comes together with the completion of the core UTU protocol and launch of our core consumer and b2b products. We’ve been hard at work on this mission for a long time, and while much has changed in our tactics and we’ve made tweaks in our model, we’ve maintained our north star around building a trust mechanism for the internet that actually works for people…and we’re more energized than ever. Join us on telegram and discord.

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