UTU Technologies is based in Kenya, UTU was founded to offer a different, social-relationship based approach to establishing trust, rather than scores, aggregated reviews and ratings in order to transform the sharing economy into a trust economy. For this purpose, UTU Technologies is building a platform consisting of two main components: A trusted recommendation service, a web service to deliver trusted service recommendations based on users’ and providers’ social relationships and other data, and A decentralised and blockchain-based protocol to enable users to make publicly verifiable staked endorsements (or disapprovals) of services, and to facilitate the necessary data provision. Each of these activities has the potential to earn rewards for the user, thus incentivising them to partake. The protocol will also not only be useable for our own service, but also other, 3rd-party services. UTU Tecnologies wants to incentivise clients directly to provide data. For this purpose, we devise a blockchain-based protocol with a non-transferable utility token -- UTU Tokens -- to be built on a blockchain platform. Intuitively, clients will be rewarded for active participation in the system with UTU Tokens. They can be used to make staked endorsements and access trusted recommendations provided by the UTU Recommendation Service and other services. The token will be non-transferable to prevent people “buying into” the network, essentially buying trust.
