#5 ICO Review uTrust cryptocurrency payment system to take on paypal?

UTRUST at a basic level is paypal plus cryptocurrency with lower fees, faster transactions, buyer and seller protections with no charge backs, all decentralized.

Warning this is a long read.

What is it?

Just think paypal but better with more advanced features and flexibility. Here I basically just pick all the good bits out of the white paper. I recommend reading the whitepaper as it is an easy informative read.

As a buyer, UTRUST minimizes the risk of scams and frauds by providing a full payment protection service while acting as a third party mediator. Your purchase is protected from the moment you pay until the delivery.

As a seller, UTRUST provides benefits through its low fees and real time transactions. This eliminates chargebacks, credit card fraud and hacked account payments.

UTRUST also allows buyers and sellers to use multiple cryptocurrencies at once. Plus, as a seller, you have the opportunity to accept all payments in the form of fiat currency, helping you stay protected from market place fluctuations.

How Does uTrust Work?

The problem

No digital payments between buyers and sellers using crypto for the masses. Current models such as paypal have high fees, are slow and inflexible.

Solution

Cut out all the middlemen. With paypal there is several intermediaries that slow down the process and increase the cost.

Using blockchain tech and crypto currencies and a new flexible solution all these middlemen are cut out reducing costs and speeding the process for everyone.

For merchants or sellers

Expand client base by targeting Cryptocurrency holders as well as Fiat currencies.
No Chargebacks and extra protection against stolen CC fraud. (how will they do this? better tech such as apps to lock your account, 2fa etc).

UTRUST Features And Benefits

This section has quite a lot of detail you can skim over it if you want to get to the good parts.

Lower Buyer Purchase Risk:

UTRUST covers all purchases (goods and most services), while traditional solutions like PayPal can only protect the purchase of physical goods. Cryptocurrency-based services like Bitpay don’t cover anything at all.

Faster Payment Approval Speed:

Because uTrust can minimize fraud it approves payments immediately. Bitpay offers similar advantages but PayPal does not.

Low Exchange Fees:

UTRUST charges sellers a flat 1% fee on received payments. PayPal charge fees of 2.9%. Those fees can rise to 5% or higher when accounting for exchange rate fees and other hidden charges.

Multiple Cryptocurrencies Accepted:

UTRUST accepts the most popular cryptocurrencies on the market, including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, Monero, and others. Bitpay, on the other hand, only accepts bitcoin, and PayPal doesn't accept cryptocurrencies.

Fund Safety:

UTRUST uses blockchain and other technologies to avoid credit card fraud related issues. Users have full control over their own private keys and funds. PayPal will often lock your funds and don't have a good track record when it comes to customers.

Fluctuation Protection - Utrust provides a transparent conversion preview of rates. The conversion from crypto to fiat is done JIT at the best market rate and added to the pool. By locking in on this amount, and assuring the hold after conversion, we ensure the seller will get the specific amount he requested, unconstrained from crypto market volatility

Sellers will be protected from rampant credit card fraud and nasty chargebacks through UTRUST. However, the website doesn’t go into much further detail about what it is but you can read between the lines as there will be no physical credit card.

Customer Payment Protection:

Customers’ payments are protected through a fast, self-mediated two-party resolution system, and an advanced 3-party resolution dispute mechanism if the first isn’t successful. This allows parties to chat in real-time guided by a UTRUST resolution mediator. In comparison, PayPal can take several months to solve a dispute.

Seller Performance-based Rating:

UTRUST implements a performance-based analytics algorithm to evaluate the performance of sellers. The idea behind this is that a transparent and honest seller should rise to the top, while low-quality sellers will disappear. Furthermore, top sellers will see their hold times virtually disappear, while low-quality sellers will see increased hold times.

Example

Here’s the basic process through which a UTRUST transaction will take place:

The buyer pays with any major cryptocurrency, taking advantage of low conversion fees. Buyers can also use a UTRUST token with zero conversion fees.

The funds are immediately converted to fiat currency in order to protect the seller from market volatility.
UTRUST uses a dynamic holding system where they hold the funds and release them to a seller, adjusted on a performance-based time frame. Escrow period is created holding the buyers money. Escrow time is reduced going by sellers rep. Can be 0-21 days.

The seller receives the amount in fiat currency, then can withdraw to a bank account, keep it in a wallet, or convert it to another cryptocurrency.

Transactions that use the UTRUST token will be converted internally and benefit from zero exchange fees.
Token burn.

Whenever payments are made not using uTrust for example bitcoin for payment small amount of the fee (which is always in uTrust token) is removed to buyback uTrust tokens and burn them, increasing the value of the token over time.

ICO

ICO date will be announced first week of October. They have decided to change the way the ICO is run as initially the price was going to gradually go up as people bought tokens. During the ICO stage all tokens will be the same price 6.5 cents.

• Limited cap of 50 million dollars (very reasonable)
• 1 billion tokens cap (This is just hitting the threshold of unreasonable, but unsold tokens will be burned)
• 5% presale public (closed)
• 10% private (Closed)
• 70% ICO Public (October TBA)
• 5% Marketing and bounty
• 10% retained by Utrust team (released at 2% per year).
• Minimum investment of 0.2 eth or 0.002 BTC
• Private sale price was 2 cents
• Pricesale prices is around 3 cents
• ICO prices will be around 6.5 cents
• Only tokens sold will be created. So any leftovers are not created or esentially burned.
• Tokens are recieved around 2 weeks after ICO.

How are the funds spent?

Competition

Bitpay, paypal, Monetha and possibley Omisego and Minerva.

Utrust wants to compete with PayPal (high fees for 5%)and Bitpay (which has limited protection mechanisms for buyers and sellers). In comparison, UTRUST charges fees of just 1% to sellers.

See the white paper for details, here is the highlights.

• All transactions protected. Paypal covers only goods and services.
• Bitpay only accepts bitcoin
• Credit card fraud is pretty much wiped out by this. You control your private keys. This is big honestly.
• No chargebacks
• Fast resolution of disputes. uTrust offers a pretty cool mediation process that only escalates if that fails. Real time chat between the two parties.

Monetha vs Utrust

Here is a list of things I found when I researched both of these coins. I passed on Monetha because of the things it was missing but uTrust has.

• Smaller team with not many tech skills vs Large team with technical skills
• Not a great whitepaper I lost interest reading it vs Well written easy to understand white paper but it is missing technical details
• Focus on Merchants Vs Focus on both sellers and buyers
• Fees of 1.5% vs 1% for seller
• Doesn't solve the full problem vs Gives buyers protection for their transactions and allows both parties to see they are paid before funds or products are released. I see this as a huge plus. Say someone wants to swap coins with me right now.
• Monetha is Eth only but I guess could implement more later vs uTrust will suport all major cryptocurrencies and fiat.
• Monetha feedback score model is generated by the users vs Organically generated so very difficult to manipulate and offers better protection.
• No protection if seller does a runner. Money is gone. All you can do is give negative feedback vs You get your money back with Utrust.

Minverva - poor white paper and website. I couldn't easily figure out what is is. I got a bit bored to dig further so DYOR.
Omgisego - Slightly different approach. Long term plan currently. They have a big company Omise behind them.

The Team

UTRUST is led by CEO Nuno Correia. Correia is an early cryptocurrency investor who has been involved in the markets since early 2011 and has successfully co-founded several B2C ventures.

Overall they look pretty good the are Switzerland based. Couldn't find any thing exceptional about them or bad about them. Linked in profiles checkout. They do appear to have a solid dev team though and is pretty large compared to some of the other competition.

Concerns

They restructured their ICO to make it more whale proof and less risky for investors in the main ICO stage which is great. They listened to the feedback. This is good. But the presale and private sale stages which represent 15% total were considerably discounted which means there is chance some of those investors will dump on the main ICO stage investors.

The whitepaper lacks technical and implementation details which is actually concerning for me. I like to know how they plan to make it all work and how all the tech fits together.

They also have no working product yet. They plan to develop and release a beta in 2018 shortly after the ICO.

They don't allow you to buy into the company they just offer the token which is essentially the fees that make the whole thing work. So by owning part of the fee pool your investment will grow in value as the tokens get burnt and volume increases.

Searching for scams or negative feedback I couldn't find any on google. That is pretty rare (at the time of writing this article).

So if you look at the the three stages of ICO they are
Private 2 cents (5% of total tokens)
Pre ICO 3 cents (10% of total tokens)
ICO 5.2 - 6.25 cents depending on if you pre registered. (see below on how to buy at 5.2 cents)

This potentially allows for pre ICO investors to almost double or double their money if they dump immediately following the ICO. It also allows for private investors to make even more. Personally I am not super worried about this as investors are likely to hold and see what they can deliver.

Extra BONUS

You can find this on their webpage and twitter.

To express our gratitude to our early supporters, anyone who is already registered, or who registers before the 20th of September 2017, will receive a 20% reward on the first $10,000 contributed. For example, if you contribute $1,000, you will receive $1,200 worth of UTRUST tokens. This reward effectively reduces the price for early supporters down to $0.052 per token.

Conclusion

The project is very ambitious and will take a lot of work with roadmap dates that will deliver working products and updates quickly. We still have around 2-3 weeks to research this one and I am for one not done.

I have been asking questions of the team and have been getting very constructive replies.

Overall it looks to be a pretty promising ICO with a great idea and vision, if they can pull it off utrust could be huge.