With the expanse of the online world, trust has become a strange thing. You never really know who’s on the other side of the screen, so how can you develop a trusted relationship with someone?
The problem is, many online services and products rely on you trusting the word of other people you haven’t met. Amazon, for example. Many people rely heavily on the Amazon review system when purchasing a product. Similarly, ride hailing apps like Uber and Lyft utilize a rating system for drivers and passengers alike. When you take these ratings into consideration, you’re having to trust the individuals that put those ratings there in the first place.
These systems are incredibly useful and guide a large amount of online transactions today – but what if we’re being manipulated? There’s no easy way to tell. But, there is a history of it. For example, recently Amazon removed more than 20,000 reviews after they were found to be fraudulent.
This isn’t a new thing either. If companies or individuals are able to influence their public presence by modifying their online ratings, it can have significant impacts on their business. And due to the way that review systems currently work, it can be very easy for the reviews to be manipulated.
Thankfully, with blockchain technology there might be an answer. By combining a financial incentive model with the transparency and immutability of blockchain, trust could be brought back to the online world. Take a look.
Introducing UTU Protocol
UTU is a new blockchain project aiming to create a more human-friendly internet by leveraging blockchain and token economics to create a platform that can replace anonymous ratings and reviews by introducing a new type of trust infrastructure. They use machine learning, social graphs and oracles to make this happen.
UTU achieves trust in a different way. If you think about it, the people you’re most likely to trust for reviews are your friends and family. That’s because you know them well. UTU took this concept and built a platform around it that’s designed to establish trust and create a sharing economy. UTU wants their platform to empower users to make informed decisions with confidence, instead of relying on anonymous reviews.
The platform has two main components:
- A feedback/recommendation service, which is essentially a web service that can be used to find trusted service recommendations based on contributed user data which is rewarded with UTU Trust Tokens.
- The decentralized protocol that makes it all work. It allows anyone to make a publicly verifiable staked endorsement about a product or service.
The key here is tokenizing trust. By using UTU Trust Tokens as the native platform currency, the UTU platform incentivizes trustworthy reviews. As a user you are able to provide feedback on a service and then stake some tokens to prove that you are being trustworthy. If the review is determined to be trustworthy over time, the user will receive tokens for their efforts. Endorsers will receive tokens if their endorsement leads to a recommendation. However, they will lose tokens if they have staked tokens on a review that is found to be false, thereby tokenizing trust.
Data submission is the heart of the UTU platform, which is why users will be rewarded in UTU Trust Tokens for doing so. Users that provide their own data to the service also receive a better, more personalized experience. They will be able to see whether their friends and family have used and review services that they are interested in, allowing them to unlock the new trust factor of the platform. If however the user doesn’t provide their data, they will still see a recommendation system but it’s based on data that’s kept anonymous, such as ‘this restaurant has been reviewed well by 5 people living in your area this week’.
Since being active and providing good information earns UTU Trust Tokens, effective the more tokens one has, the more trustworthy they are. However, the key thing about the UTU token is that it’s non-transferrable. This prevents people being able to buy the token on the market and essentially ‘buy trust’.
DeFi application
UTU could be a perfect platform for DeFi users. The DeFi space is notoriously hard to navigate, with scam projects popping up all over the place. With a decentralized trust protocol in place, users could read reviews and use services with confidence, knowing that well trusted individuals are rating them highly.
Closing thoughts
Reviews are massively important. They influence buyer decisions. But they are also inherently flawed, since they are anonymous. How are you supposed to trust someone that you don’t know and have never met?
UTU Platform is a new blockchain protocol that brings trust to its users in a whole new way, by incentivizing good, trustful reviews with token staking and rewards.
*This article has been sponsored. The Daily Chain encourages you to carry out your own research before you make any form of investment and educate yourself about how to stay safe in the crypto space. The above article does not represent financial, investment or trading advice and we do not recommend the purchase of any cryptocurrency or product without consulting a financial aid. The Daily Chain strongly encourages you to do your own research before making any investment decisions.
