In East Africa, the Swahili word “utu” means “the state of being humane” or “being considerate.” And one of the critical elements of someone humane is trustworthiness. However, trust has been hard to find on Africa’s e-commerce platforms.

Decision to purchase a product or service online is heavily influenced by peer reviews. Shoppers want to know the experience of other buyers to determine the suitability of the product or service. But do you trust that the reviews are from genuine customers?

The devil is in the details, according to Jason Eisen, the founder of a startup that goes by the same Swahili word – UTU Technologies.

Providing Single Source of Truth in Online Reviews

Eisen knows major shopping brands who would want to ensure that their review sections remain opaque. UTU’s Trust API aims to verify all online product and service reviews and social interactions including reviews and credit scores. This is what he calls Trust-as-a-Service built on top of a blockchain platform. Blockchain is widely regarded for its ability to provide a single source of truth.

“I can’t tell you how many marketplaces told us, ‘I cannot use UTU Trust API, because we wouldn’t be able to manipulate our ratings’,” Eisen told Nodo News. “It is disappointing at the level of pervasiveness in manipulation in Web2 commerce marketplaces.”

Many Africans have suffered through online review fraud, with the cases being more amplified in South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Fake online reviews are costing the global online shopping industry $152 billion. UTU seeks to end this vice.

Eisen founded the startup in 2017 after an experiment with his first ride-hailing company, Maramoja Taxis. In this model, the app refers drivers to riders, based on social links.

“We realized customers did not want to get a random taxi driver,” Eisen narrates.

“Everybody had a guy, a guy based near their house or a guy near their office or the gym,” Eisen said. He then built UTU Technologies from this premise.

“We started to get this idea of decentralized trust based on humane relationships, hence our name UTU,” he says. It was the first African firm to conduct an Initial DEX Offering (IDO) on Uniswap.

Building Trust in Finance Sector

(Jason Eisen, the founder of UTU Technologies / Photo by Eisen)

“We realize that decentralized social trust was going to eventually become the predominant form of trust online. It’s almost inevitable,” Eisen notes.

Companies seeking a decentralized reputation protocol that can easily use the company’s software development kit (SDK) or API to integrate it into their systems. “It can provide a robust, review, recommendation and rating engine,” Eisen added.

The service now extends to other data relationships including credit-worthiness assessments.

“Measuring credit-worthiness effectively, especially in the absence of traditional formal banking data or lending data was critical,” Eisen says. The Creditworthiness API is in use with some of the financial institutions in Africa.

The MPesa Data Extractor is another credit analysis product from UTU. “It allows MPesa users across Africa to upload an MPesa statement, and have it validated for authenticity,” its whitepaper denotes. “It parses data into creditworthiness models to enable access to DeFi Loans for more than 50 Million African MPesa users.”

M-Pesa announced last October that it had 30.5 million active users who transacted $233.4 billion in the 12 months ending March 31, 2022. That is more than twice the size of Kenya’s GDP.

Maramoja has used this service to unlock financing for drivers. Eisen says drivers can also get instant access to their pay. In other ride-hailing platforms, it would otherwise be paid in 30 days.

Decentralized Trust Infrastructure for the World

Decentralizing trust to save the internet is the company’s primary goal. According to Eisen, UTU’s Trust infrastructure is needed beyond Africa’s shorelines.

The startup is planning to extend the use of its Trust API to businesses and individuals across the world.

In this bid, UTU is launching its browser extension that will speak to the needs of consumers. The extension will make it easier for users to interact confidently with Web3.

“There are basically only five things you can do from your wallet: connect, send, swap, stake and borrow; we want to help you do them all safely and confidently,” the CEO says. “Our goal is using African principles of decentralized trust to transform the Internet.”

Eisen explains: “The key to transforming trust on the internet is not just technical but economic. Arguably UTU’s greatest innovation is our Token Economic Model, which monetizes the building of trust online and eliminates all of the perverse incentives currently available to bad actors seeking to manipulate trust online.”

When truth becomes scarce, growth stagnates. But when this truth is decentralized and shared, trust is restored and growth rebounds. This is UTU’s vision for a global digital economy running on Web3.

-Edited by Faustine Ngila