We’ve updated our roadmap to provide the launch timelines for our Ocean Market integrations, testnet, mainnet, and more.
Hello UTU Trust Guardians!
Due to some major developments that happened in Q2 (like our partnership with Ocean Protocol!), we’ve made some important updates to our company roadmap for the rest of 2021 and into 2022.
Let’s jump right into it!
Q3 2021
Launch Creditworthiness API (Done!)
We released the first version of our Creditworthiness API!
The Creditworthiness API will allow both traditional and DeFi lenders to more accurately assess the creditworthiness of borrowers. Our artificial intelligence engine will analyze many data inputs, including our clients’ existing customer data, social relationships, and more to better identify trustworthy borrowers and those with a higher probability of default.
For traditional lenders, our Creditworthiness API can increase loan volume and decrease defaults. For DeFi lenders, this can facilitate undercollateralized loans, which we believe will be the next massive wave in decentralized finance.
We’ve already seen strong interest in this products, so stay tuned for more news on who we’re integrating with!
Release M-PESA Parser API (Done!)
We also launched the first version of our M-PESA statement parser! This tool will help our Africa-based clients extract data, such as name, phone number, and account payment activity, from their customers’ M-PESA statements. Clients can then use this data with our Creditworthiness API or their own credit scoring models.
We’ve significantly increased the functionality of the parser, including the ability to parse both personal and business M-PESA statements and bulk upload statements for faster processing.
Deliver Ocean Market Integration Milestone 1 — Web App with UTU Trust Signals
The first milestone of our partnership with Ocean Protocol will be delivered toward the end of Q3.
We will extend our DeFi Portal with data assets from the Ocean Market and show UTU trust signals on them, as well as on data assets publishers, liquidity providers and consumers using UTU’s trust infrastructure. This will work for data assets on all production networks currently supported by Ocean Market, i.e. Ethereum, Polygon and BSC.
We are super excited to build these UTU trust signals for Ocean and then repurpose it for other marketplace platforms in the future!
Q4 2021
Launch UTU Protocol Testnet
We’ve made a lot of progress building the UTU Trust Token (UTT) smart contracts on Aeternity, but the network recently introduced a hard fork that would require a major refactoring of our smart contract code.
Given 1) this hard fork, 2) our tokens already being deployed on Ethereum and BSC, and 3) the fact that most of our implementations will be on protocols like Ethereum, Polygon, and many other EVM-compatible chains, we will port the UTT smart contracts to Solidity instead of continuing to build directly on Aeternity.
Once we port our code and launch the testnet, you’ll be able to do the following in the test environment:
- Receive UTT for submitting accurate ratings, reviews, and recommendations.
- Convert UTT to UTU Coin (UTU).
- Access UTT balances in a web and/or mobile app.
There are still many decisions to be made and the timeline for testnet launch still needs to be fully fleshed out, but we expect much of the work to be completed in Q4.
Deliver Ocean Market Integration Milestones 2 and 3 — Integrate UTU Trust Signals Directly into Ocean Market
For milestones 2 and 3 of our Ocean partnership, we will build a community signals widget for Ocean Market and, using this, integrate the UTU trust signals we built for Milestone 1.
This will make UTU trust signals directly visible in the Ocean Market application, allowing users to easily determine which are the most trustworthy and high-quality data providers, buyers, and datasets right in the app.
Release Trust SDK for Android
We will also release the Trust SDK for Android so developers can easily integrate our Trust API functionality into their Android apps. There are over 3 billion Android users spanning over 190 countries, so our Android SDK can be a huge step in the adoption of UTU around the globe.
Q1 2022
Launch UTU Mainnet
Even though the timeline for the testnet launch is still in flux, we expect to release it in Q4. And after extensive testing and improvement, we expect to launch the UTU mainnet in Q1 2022.
We will then improve upon the UTU mainnet’s functionality and stability and better integrate it with the Trust API and SDK.
This is where the full power of UTU will be realized.
The UTU protocol will reward users for accurate rating and reviews and sharing their data. Combining this with the Trust API and SDK, which allows businesses to interact with this user data to provide better product and service recommendations, will be an extremely powerful combination that will increase trust across the entire internet.
Deliver Ocean Market Integration Milestones 4 and 5
Milestone 4 of our Ocean partnership includes updating UTU trust signals calculation to support the Ocean V4 release.
Milestone 5 entails adding our personalized curation and recommendations — via UTU’s feedback form and display — in the standalone web app and to the Ocean Market community signals widget.
The timeline for these milestones depends on a few factors outside of our control, but we expect they may be completed in Q1 2022.
Update DeFi Portal
We will incorporate the Trust API and SDK advancements, as well as some features of the work we’ll do for Ocean, into the DeFi Portal. Users will then be able to actively provide feedback about DeFi protocols and the app will serve improved recommendations based on this.
Q2 2022
Extend Trust API/SDK to Additional Sectors and Platforms
We will continue to customize and extend our Trust API and SDK to other important sectors.
This may include freelancing / hiring (such as for our partner CryptoTask), eCommerce, home and local services, and other sectors. This may also include product integrations into web browsers like Chrome and Brave, messaging apps like Telegram, eCommerce ecosystems like Shopify and WooCommerce, and many more.
We’ll also launch our iOS SDK to allow developers to integrate UTU into their iPhone apps.
Launch UTU Developer Program
There are so many use cases for UTU, and we can’t build them all! So we will launch the UTU Developer Program to incentivize developers to create apps on the UTU mainnet and improve the protocol.
Introduce UTU Governance Process
We will launch the initial version of the UTU protocol governance process, where you, the UTU Trust Guardians, will be responsible for leading the future direction of the network!
Conclusion
Phew, that’s a lot of stuff to build!
We are excited to realize our vision of the internet being a safer, more trusted place to gather, share, work, and trade. And we can’t wait to deliver all of these products for you.
Please let us know what you think by sending us your thoughts on Twitter or Telegram.
Thank you so much for your support!
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To learn more about UTU, visit us on our website, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
Originally published at https://utu.io on July 20, 2021.
