Tru Reputation Network — Bringing Trustless Reputation To The Blockchain

With centralized trust systems, there are multiple issues. We are trusting a central authority to manage how we trust others — this is a blatant oxymoron when we pause and think about it for just a few seconds. Yet this is what we do every day when we browse the Internet looking for something to buy, for reviews of products — even when we look for potential business partners or employees to hire. What if trust itself could be stored on the blockchain — a trustless decentralized system?

With hindsight, “trust” is an obvious problem in need of an obvious solution, yet until now no company has endeavored to store something so important as trust in a manner that is trustless. After all, trusting someone so that you can trust others is open to blatant abuse as we all probably know from first hand experience. Review websites are easily manipulated, peoples reputations are easily fabricated on centralized websites such as LinkedIn where fake connections can be made — the issue of fake trust is a big one.

Enter the Tru Reputation Network, the first decentralized protocol that aims to solve the trust problem.

How Does The Tru Reputation Network Work?

In blockchain, we can trust transaction consensus since we don’t rely on any centralized entity to tell us the truth about a transaction, instead multiple people verify a transaction independently and it’s this pool of verifications that we trust rather than any individual. In effect, this is a trustless system, since without consensus no transaction can take place. The Tru Reputation Network, at its heart, aims to do the same thing but with Trust.

The TRU team has designed the Tru Reputation Protocol, an advanced protocol that utilizes what’s called “Proof of Reputation”, as a system to establish decentralized trust. Confused? Let me explain. With traditional blockchains we have what’s known as “Proof of Work” — this is the system described in the previous paragraph whereby transactions are verified by other individuals (miners) and only become accepted if all these miners reach a consensus with one another that a transaction is valid. Now, with the Tru Reputation Protocol, instead of verifying transactions, individuals leave feedback for some entity instead. This feedback acts as a decentralized reference as to whether an entity may be trustworthy or not.

Now, like with mining transactions, trust can only be achieved when multiple decentralized entities reach a consensus as to the trustworthiness of an individual. Fabricating trust is not possible anymore than fabricating a transaction is, since entities that don’t trust the individual will form part of the consensus decision. This at heart is what “Proof of Reputation” is.

That explanation is highly simplified, and the technology behind the protocol is more advanced than that, but in essence this is what the network aims to do.

Using the patented (pending) Tru Feedback Algorithm, individual entities can leave feedback for some other party based on simple text (semantic) terms. These semantics terms are pooled with other feedback-givers until a consensus as to the trustworthiness of a party is reached.

In my opinion, this system is quite simply genius. The protocol goes even further so as to allow the reputation of entities to be stored on multiple ecosystems ranging from the traditional Web right through to other blockchains. In essence, the trustworthiness of an entity can be based anywhere on the Internet or on any blockchain.

The TRU Token

So just what incentive do people have to leave trust? Enter into the Tru Reputation Token (TRU). This token acts as an incentive to leave trust the same way as payment acts as an incentive for miners to verify a transaction in traditional “Proof of Work” systems. When someone wants to verify the trustworthiness of an entity via Proof of Reputation, they must pay to do so using the TRU token.

In essence, the utility of the TRU token is in the fact that’s required for the functioning of the entire Tru Reputation Network. If Trust could be considered a currency, then the TRU token would be that currency.

Only a maximum of 100,000,000 of these TRU tokens will ever be created, setting a hard inflation-proof limit on the system. This is good news for investors as the token value can only go up as the platform becomes more widely adopted.

Half of all TRU tokens (50,000,000) will be sold via crowdsale. Amazingly, only 10% of the tokens are reserved for the team (this is incredibly humble given how greedy other projects often are) and only 2% is reserved for advisors. 20% of tokens are kept for reserve.

Investing In The ICO Crowdsale

The pre-sale for the TRU Token is already open, running until 5th March 2018. The main crowdsale will begin Q2 2018, around either May or June this year.

The base token price is 0.001 ETH. There will be a 25% bonus during the pre-sale, and a very generous 12.5% bonus during the crowdsale (1 ETH = 1250 TRU in the pre-sale, 1 ETH = 1125 TRU during the crowdsale).

TRU is stored as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum platform, and payment is made via ETH.

You can join the pre-sale and crowdsale here: https://tru.ltd/tokensale

Conclusion

Whilst many ICO projects have unoriginal ideas that mimic others, the TRU Reputation Network is the first project to properly decentralize something so important as Trust itself. After all, we trust others when it comes to things such as investing our money in an ICO. Imagine if in the future this trust could be more certain? The TRU Reputation Protocol “Proof of Reputation” system is a first of its kind that will properly decentralize trust in the same way transactions are decentralized.

If you’re looking for a project that is truly innovative and that may disrupt multiple industries ranging from resume sites, networking sites, review sites, and any entity that is based on trust, then you’ll definitely want to pay attention to the TRU Reputation Network ICO.

Links -
Website: https://tru.ltd/
ICO: https://tru.ltd/tokensale
Whitepaper: https://tru.ltd/Tru_Reputation_Protocol_White_Paper.pdf
Protocol Sheet: https://tru.ltd/Tru_Reputation_Protocol_Info_Sheet.pdf
BitCoinTalk Announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2712535.0

(my username on BCT: JainaVsUther)