The Decentralized Trust Infrastructure for Web3, UTU Protocol Mainnet, Is Live!

UTU Protocol Mainnet, the decentralized Trust Infrastructure for Web3, is officially live, paving the way for a bigger product announcement in coming weeks.

We’re excited to announce that the UTU Protocol Mainnet is live on Polygon Mainnet, to create the decentralized trust infrastructure of web3.

UTU Protocol Mainnet is now live, setting the stage for users to start earning UTT and build their digital reputation. Developers can now integrate UTU Protocol to let users view UTU Trust Signals including providing feedback and UTU Trust Token (UTT) endorsements within their sites and dApps. This gives users the signals they need to safely interact with web 3 assets, and an avenue to leave feedback and make endorsements themselves.

As we interact with the web, especially Web3, every action we take carries some amount of risk, both real and perceived. These risks together make the user experience anxiety-inducing. Even experienced users fear connecting to a sketchy dApp, transacting with a wrong address, or buying a scam token on a DEX.

Since launching Testnet at the end of March, we have learnt a lot from our users’ experiences, complaints, and wishes. We have listened and will continue to improve the user interface and experience.

How mainnet will work

The UTU Protocol will provide high level summary signals about interactions, feedback, and endorsements of a site (url) from your network at a glance as well as a detailed view that lets you watch video stories from your network about the site as well as view badges, star ratings, text reviews, and token endorsements of the site from your network and at large.

You can easily leave feedback on a site in the form of video, stars, badges, and text. You can also make an endorsement of the site with some of your UTT balance — you can think about this as putting some of your reputation that you’ve earned from sharing data into UTU protocol behind your feedback of a particular site — utu.io for instance.

When others in your network see your endorsement, and then interact with the site, and endorse it onward, there’s a UTT reward that is generated for you as the endorser for helping facilitate a good outcome. On the contrary, if you endorse a site that goes on to scam folks, your staked UTT would be penalized (in an upcoming release). In this sense, it’s not the act of reviewing that will generate you the most UTT but rather positive outcomes of transactions informed by your endorsements/content.

Monetize your reputation with $UTU payouts

UTU’s Review-to-Earn Value Proposition is at the heart of our entire token model. The link between UTT, your reputation, and $UTU coin is the crux of UTU protocol. In previous versions of our White Paper, we had included an auction mechanism to convert UTT into $UTU. While this mechanism was very elegant economically — because it established a market price for the conversion -, it was more complicated UX-wise, required more expertise from the users, and also reduced the user’s UTT balance. The latter is a rather undesirable property, because the UTT balance as a measure of the user’s reputation as a constructive contributor to the system shouldn’t be reduced because the user wants to reap some $UTU rewards.

We’ve therefore remodeled this mechanism as a direct $UTU payout for UTT generated, to simplify the UX, allow your reputation to accrue and diminish according to the quality of endorsements, independent of the $UTU reward. The implementation of this will come in a soon to be released version of the protocol, first on testnet.

UTU Protocol has an initial reward pool of 300 million $UTUs that serves as the network flywheel. The goal is that by the time the initial reward pool is depleted, UTU Protocol’s daily intake of fees for accessing trust signals will have grown to such a level that daily reputation payouts are perpetually funded by the day’s inflows. We will begin experimenting with these mechanisms and parameters over the coming months before turning these features on, more to come on this soon.

You can read more about these changes and the model in general in our updated white paper!

Get started with UTU Protocol Mainnet

To ensure all is running smoothly, there will be some continued internal testing in the coming days. In the meantime, see Mainnet in action, on our very own UTU.io!

We’re working on some known issues all of which will be fixed or included in future versions:

• For some users, connecting Telegram still doesn’t work due to unknown reasons.
• The UTU Website disconnects the wallet on reload.
• Removing stake from endorsements and making disapprovals not yet available.
• UTU Coin rewards not yet available.

Make sure to share to let us know what you think on any of our channels below. We are always very happy to hear from you.

Stay tuned for more news, product releases and promotions as we continue to build mainnet!

Join us on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord for future updates.

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Originally published at https://utu.io on October 12, 2022.