The Kenyan tech firm launched their crowd sale this morning and sold out almost immediately
UTU is a Nairobi-based AI and blockchain firm that aims to create infrastructures for trust on the internet through the use of machine learning, social graphs and oracles. It was established in 2017 by CEO Jason Eisen, whose previous project, Maramoja, was Africa’s first taxi app.
Eisen explained in an interview earlier this year that UTU had grown out of Maramoja: “We originally were just thinking to build something like Uber for Africa, and we realised … we were solving the wrong problem … Uber was solving the problem: ‘How do I get a taxi?’, and everyone here was saying … ‘How do I get a taxi that I trust?’.”
UTU means ‘humanity’ in Swahili, and their Trust application programming interface (API) offers users personalised recommendations on sharing platforms for trusted service providers, from taxi drivers, to babysitters, to Peer to Peer lenders and much more.
In 2018, UTU started tokenizing and decentralising trust through the UTU protocol, paving the way “… to remove some of the burdens of over-collateralization and trustless-ness in the DeFi space”, and in a tweet on Monday, reviewer TOP 7 ICO ranked UTU as one of the top 7 upcoming low cap DeFi projects.
UTU announced last week that they would be building on the Elrond Network, a highly scalable blockchain platform. The collaboration will focus initially on circulating some of the UTU token supply on Elrond’s mainnet by creating a token swap bridge, before making UTU’s trusted recommendations available to Elrond Dapps early next year; bringing Elrond exposure to the fast-growing African markets.
The crowd sale for the UTU coin, an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network, took place today at 08:00 EAT (06:00 BST) and sold out in just a few minutes. Eisen said on Twitter shortly afterwards: “That was incredible, we’re already sold out … now onward and upward.”
UTU will be listed on the Uniswap decentralised exchange (DEX) protocol on October 16 – two days’ time on October 16th