What is Fetch.ai and How does it Work?

BeginnerJul 27, 2023
Fetch.AI is transforming industries with its AI-powered blockchain architecture. Discover their diverse range of products for secure data management, eco-friendly transportation, asset tokenization, and trusted social interactions. Explore how Fetch.AI is shaping a sustainable and interconnected future.
What is Fetch.ai and How does it Work?

Fetch.ai aims to establish a decentralized network of autonomous agents that can communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). A group of experts in AI, blockchain, and software engineering founded the project in 2017. Fetch.ai envisions making AI and ML accessible to everyone without requiring technical expertise or centralized intermediaries. By using blockchain technology, users can create, deploy, and train digital agents to carry out various tasks and services across a range of domains and industries. These agents can also interact with other agents and data sources on the network, forming a collective intelligence that optimizes outcomes and generates value

History, Origins and Key Persons

Humayun Sheikh, Toby Simpson, and Thomas Hain developed the idea for Fetch.ai in 2017. Sheikh is the CEO of the company. He is an entrepreneur and investor with more than 20 years of experience in technology and new ideas. Simpson is the Chief Technology Officer. He is a software engineer and game developer with over 25 years of experience making AI systems and virtual worlds. Hain is the Chief Security Officer. He is a professor of speech and audio technology at Sheffield University and a leading researcher in machine learning and natural language processing.

The people who work on Fetch.ai come from places like Cambridge University, CERN, DeepMind, Goldman Sachs, and Nokia, and there are more than 50 of them. They are founders, developers, researchers, engineers, designers, and marketers. In March 2019, Binance hosted an initial exchange offering (IEO) for Fetch.ai, which raised $6 million. And in March 2023, DWF Labs led a $40 million investment round in Fetch.ai.

How does FET Work?

FET stands for “Fetch.ai Token,” and it is an important part of the Fetch.ai ecosystem. It is meant to make the network’s operations and applications easier and more powerful. Here’s how FET works in more detail:

  • Governance: Governance is one of the most important ways the FET token is used. As a governance token, it gives the people who own it a say in how the Fetch.ai ecosystem grows and changes. Token holders can suggest changes or vote on proposed changes to network parameters, resource allocation, or even codebase updates. This model of governance makes sure that the platform changes based on what the community needs and wants.
  • Staking and Network Security: FET tokens can be staked, meaning they are temporarily locked up in the network. Staking is a way for token holders to help keep the network safe and earn FET tokens in return. Staking is an important part of many blockchain networks because it helps reach consensus and keep the network safe. In Fetch.ai, staking also grants access to additional features, such as participation in collective learning processes.
  • Transaction and Service Fees: On the Fetch.ai platform, FET is used to pay for different services and transactions. For example, users pay fees when they create and use autonomous agents or when they use the network to get information or run smart contracts. These fees are paid in FET tokens, which are used to pay the people on the network who make these actions possible.
  • Incentive Mechanism: The FET token gives different people in the ecosystem a reason to do something. Users can get FET tokens as a reward for contributing useful data or liquidity to the platform. In the same way, developers can earn FET tokens by making apps or services that help the network grow and become more useful.
  • Access to Collective Learning: FET tokens can also be used to get into Fetch.ai’s collective learning module, where autonomous agents share data and models. Learning from each other helps agents improve their work and make better decisions. People can take part in this process of learning by staking FET tokens.
  • Interactions Between Platforms: FET tokens can also be used to communicate with other blockchain platforms. Because Fetch.ai is interoperable, FET can be moved between different blockchain networks and used for cross-chain services and apps.
  • Token Economics and Scarcity: Like many other cryptocurrencies, FET may only be available in a limited number of units. This makes it more likely that people will hold on to and use the tokens. As the network grows and more services and apps are built on top of it, FET tokens may become more popular, which could affect their value.

Main Features of Fetch.ai

Fetch.ai includes a range of innovative features that integrate blockchain technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These features enable decentralized networks of autonomous agents, privacy-preserving collective learning, secure data exchange, and much more. In Fetch.ai’s ecosystem, we can find projects like CoLearn, Axim, Atomix, Mobix, Catena, Resonate, Starfleit, Mettalex, and the Leap Wallet. Each product addresses specific use cases and aspects of the Fetch.ai ecosystem.

Consensus mechanism

The mechanism for reaching consensus used by Fetch.ai is the Useful Proof-of-Work (UPoW). When using it, new blocks are generated in a manner that is comparable to that which is seen with standard Proof-of-Stake protocols. At the same time, the order of transactions is determined based on the work that takes place in the time between the generation of two blocks. Even the less powerful nodes can earn their share of the block rewards because specific computing problems are ranked according to their degrees of difficulty and then packaged into proof-of-work packages. The platform that is based on distributed computing and is arranged in this manner is intended to solve the more difficult problems, such as those relating to artificial intelligence or scheduling.

Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs) & Open Economic Framework (OEF)

Fetch.AI is positioning itself as a fundamental component for future decentralized data marketplaces. It has set its sights on supplanting centralized systems that are responsible for a myriad of tasks - from distributing data to rendering everyday services like booking hotel rooms. The creators behind Fetch believe that an open and decentralized system like theirs is better suited for collaboration in an economy dominated by machines. Their software agents operate as digital entities capable of conducting transactions autonomously and can represent themselves, devices, the services they offer, or individual users. These agents, despite having no prior experience with various challenges, can leverage AI to participate in decision-making processes both for themselves and for Fetch.AI users. The users of Fetch.AI can be individuals, businesses, or government organizations, and the spectrum of tasks the agents can perform is incredibly diverse, including anything from monitoring the availability of flight tickets to creating weather models or optimizing supply chains.

Fetch.AI also aims to create an Open Economic Framework (OEF), intended to be an ecosystem where agents and digital data can interact efficiently and cost-effectively. Properly harnessing user-generated data is a top priority in Fetch.AI’s digital economy model. The OEF is expected to make data from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices a tradable commodity, as agents will be integrated into each device. For example, a Fetch.AI agent in a car could detect weather conditions through the car’s windshield wipers and relay this information to the digital ecosystem, to facilitate the provision of services that are relevant to this information. Fetch.AI’s autonomous agents are valuable to those who require this data, even if the latter are not consciously seeking it. As these agents become conduits for various data, devices, and services, they evolve into invaluable assets for data analysts and market experts keen on enhancing service delivery.

Fetch.AI is built like a digital symphony with three entwined layers working harmoniously to generate value from data and ensure it reaches the right destinations.

  1. Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs): The first layer is the realm of AEAs. These agents circulate within an environment where trust and reputation information flow, minimizing transaction risks.
  2. Open Economic Framework (OEF): The second layer, the OEF, sits on a ledger that acts as a sanctuary for Fetch.AI’s digital currency, FET, and a decentralized transaction system.
  3. Fetch Smart Ledger: The crown jewel is the third layer – the Fetch smart ledger. This ledger is a maestro conducting reputation, trust, and intelligence to safeguard the system’s integrity. It’s crucial as it oversees market intelligence, which agents need to access efficiently. Imagine machine learning dissecting how different markets interact, that’s what this layer does.

Fetch.AI is not just smart; it’s also built for scale. The smart ledger can potentially support millions of transactions per second and is agile, molding itself to bridge the OEF with Fetch agents. By weaving transaction chains with aspects of the directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employing a “resource lane” approach akin to sharding, Fetch.AI achieves scalability. Transactions are sorted into lanes, optimized, and then grouped, with the system’s capacity being a function of the number of lanes.

Now, let’s talk about AEAs. They are like busy bees collecting data, and they use the Fetch.AI platform to connect with those who crave this data. But, information like weather or traffic is geographically sensitive, so agents are sorted based on various criteria, including:

  • Geographical Location: AEAs have a physical spot but can zip across to any location via connected nodes without extra charges.
  • Economic Proximity: AEAs are also arranged based on their closeness to relevant markets for their data.
  • Infrastructure Distribution: The network also considers the layout of infrastructure like airports or railway stations in the area that the agents cover.

Although sorted, every agent has a unique identifier linked to their wallets, allowing them to send and receive Fetch tokens. Plus, they maintain a list of nodes they are connected to.

AEAs come in diverse flavors:

  • Inhabitants: Inhabitants are tied to real-world hardware like sensors or vehicles, acting almost like remote human operators.
  • Interfaces: They’re the bridge between the conventional economy and the digital realm, linked to sensors or data, and can carry out regular economic tasks.
  • Software Agents: Residing purely in the digital world, these agents are like digital sleuths finding the best ways to serve user needs.
  • Digital Data Sales Agents: Attached to data sources, their mission is to extract value from data.
  • Representative Agents: These are the digital alter-egos of users, acting as their personal digital butlers within the Fetch ecosystem.

Fetch.ai Ecosystem

CoLearn

Introducing CoLearn, a marketplace for data and AI models developed by Fetch.ai. It is a blockchain-enabled platform that paves the way for shared machine learning without needing a central authority or sharing of individual datasets. CoLearn empowers stakeholders to generate, stake on, and benefit from AI models while ensuring data privacy via DabbaFlow’s advanced encryption. This platform revolutionizes machine learning by decentralizing it. Stakeholders can create AI models, propose new weight sets for them, and the collective votes on these proposals. If the majority sees value in the new weights, they’re adopted, leading to the improvement of the shared model.

CoLearn also presents a unique financial opportunity. By staking on AI models, users can invest in their development and earn from their success. Users can also monetize their data and expertise by offering valuable insights drawn from confidential data, all while respecting privacy. The current version, v.0.2.8, comes with an interface for developers to define their own model architectures, with future versions set to incorporate more improvements and blockchain-based backends. CoLearn is thus a thriving ecosystem for AI collaboration, fostering innovation in data science.

Axim

Axim, a service from Fetch.ai, is a revolutionary tool made to help businesses manage and analyze data in a complex environment. It acts as a safe bridge between data silos, allowing businesses to use the power of their data without compromising privacy. Data is a valuable asset in the digital age, but raw data needs to be processed before it can be used to its full potential. Models for machine learning are the key to finding patterns in data and getting useful insights from them. But as privacy concerns grow, it is getting harder to access raw data.

Here’s where Axim steps in, employing state-of-the-art privacy-preserving techniques that aid businesses in identifying hidden patterns, measuring, and improving performance. It encourages using larger and more diverse data sets without violating privacy constraints, thereby enabling more accurate insights.

Axim’s unique design incorporates a learner and a coordinator for each participant. The learner processes raw data and produces an encrypted model, without exposing any identifiable raw data. Simultaneously, the coordinator operates on the blockchain, aggregating these models and facilitating collaboration with other participants to create the final model.

One of the standout features of Axim is its decentralized, trustless coordination protocol that employs blockchain. It also features a programmable aggregation protocol through smart contracts and maintains full control over data privacy using advanced machine learning and cryptographic techniques like differential privacy.

Axim caters to various sectors including finance and banking, healthcare, and manufacturing. In finance and banking, it can enhance fraud prevention methods, analyze customer spending patterns, and manage risk. In healthcare, Axim’s analytics can help avoid preventable diseases, reduce the cost of treatments, and predict epidemic outbreaks. For manufacturing, it supports data-driven decision-making for operational improvements and predictive maintenance, offering fast, decentralized insights from IoT devices. Axim ultimately promises a more efficient and insightful data processing experience, all while keeping privacy at its core.

Atomix

Atomix, powered by Fetch.ai, is a game-changing decentralized finance lending platform that reshapes liquidity by tokenizing real-world assets as security. This groundbreaking platform seamlessly bridges collateralized lending and tokenization, leveraging security over physical assets as collateral for stablecoin loans. The Atomix ecosystem synthesizes an asset tokenization system, lending protocol, and a governance system, offering flexibility, transparency, and trust.

With Atomix, borrowers have the liberty to manage their loans flexibly, and lenders can enjoy instant redemption. Atomix also introduces three distinct tokens, xTokens, Atomix Collateral Tokens (ACT), and Governance Tokens (ATMX), each playing a unique role within the system. As a revolutionary solution, Atomix combines the best of tokenization and collateralized lending to overcome the limitations of traditional lending platforms and paves the way for efficient, secure decentralized finance.

Mobix

Mobix is an exciting platform that reshapes how we think about travel in our cities. It’s a pioneering concept that centers on “micromobility,” which includes eco-friendly transportation options like electric scooters, bikes, or even walking. The cool part is that Mobix isn’t just encouraging us to use these green transport options; it’s rewarding us for doing so.

Imagine you’re Alice, someone who drives to work every day. Now, Bob comes along with his fleet of electric scooters. Bob’s scooters are linked with Mobix, which means you can earn special “Mobix miles” every time you use one for your commute. These miles can then be swapped for Mobix tokens, a type of digital currency. It’s not just about travel, either. Suppose Charlie owns a coffee shop, and he decides to accept Mobix miles as payment for his coffee. Alice can now spend the miles she’s earned from her eco-friendly commute on a caffeine boost at Charlie’s shop.

All of this is powered by Fetch.ai, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, ensuring that everything runs smoothly and securely. The best part? While earning and spending your Mobix miles, you’re contributing to reducing carbon emissions and making our cities slightly greener. Mobix is more than just an incentive program. It’s a new way to think about moving around our cities, spending our money, and caring for our planet. All while ensuring the complete privacy and protection of your data.

Catena-X

Catena-X Automotive Network, powered by Fetch.ai, is designed to revolutionize the automotive industry. The goal is to provide an open ecosystem for the secure and efficient exchange of information throughout the automotive value chain. This cloud-based network includes all companies in the European vehicle industry, along with their global partners, users, and equipment suppliers. With the participation of many players, the automotive value chain incorporates about 40,000 parts to build a single car. Catena-X aims to harmonize this complex process by creating a secure, efficient, and resilient value chain, which even includes the dismantling and recycling process to prioritize environmental sustainability.

It focuses on improving business processes and circularity, adapting to new legislation and geopolitical realities while ensuring high-quality data on a global scale. By connecting all companies along the value chain, Catena-X can increase efficiency, improve competitiveness, and reduce costs.

Instead of individual companies implementing costly, custom solutions, Catena-X promotes collaboration and interoperability. A common goal is to establish a standardized global data exchange based on European values. This cooperative and interoperable approach simplifies tasks like calculating a vehicle’s carbon footprint, which traditionally can be very complex.

Data sovereignty is a cornerstone of Catena-X’s philosophy. Companies retain full ownership of their data and decide on the terms of their exchange. This principle ensures a secure ecosystem where every participant can control their data.

Resonate

Resonate is a decentralized social network designed to utilize the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create an environment that is safe, trusted, and free from untrustworthy sources. Alongside this innovative social experience, it provides an exclusive NFT marketplace for its users. At its core, Resonate is a Social DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) that seeks to meet the needs of web3 users in a rapidly changing digital landscape. With trust in social media platforms at an all-time low, Resonate leverages AI to create a secure social experience that also offers users the ability to monetize their social trust through NFT-driven token economics.

Rather than merely creating a web2-like social network on a blockchain, Resonate operates on two levels. First, it utilizes a DAO with clear governance mechanisms that encourage enthusiastic audience participation, incentivized via token economics. Second, it offers a blockchain-based social platform designed for safety, trust-centric social sharing and connections, and trust-enabled tokenomics.It leverages the power of Fetch.ai’s ‘Autonomous Economic Agents’ to create ‘ReSources’ - personal AI proxies that can be trained to manage a user’s complete web3 social presence. With this feature, users can deploy their own custom ReSources to avoid malicious actors like spammers, trolls, and misinformation peddlers, enhance their social presence and find and transact NFTs from trusted peers.

The inception of Resonate stems from several factors: the precipitous decline in trust in web2 social platforms due to data breaches, social trolling, and a lack of safety; the rise of web3, motivated by crypto-economics and driven by the NFT and DAO movements; and the emergence of AI for web3 through Fetch.ai’s blockchain-native AI architecture.

A key component of Resonate is the use of Autonomous Social Agents (ASAs), or ReSources. These are AI-driven task proxies that help users accomplish specific functions, ensuring a highly curated and safe web3 social experience. Once deployed, a ReSource acts independently to execute specific actions to achieve prescribed outcomes, whether accessing and filtering specific types of third-party content, accessing trusted NFT catalogs, or screening peers in the network based on social trust. Users will need RESO Tokens to create them.

Mettalex

Mettalex is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform associated with Fetch.ai. It focuses on commodities and derivatives trading, allowing users to trade without taking custody of the underlying assets. Mettalex aims to bridge the gap between traditional financial markets and decentralized finance.

Conclusion

The fact that Fetch.AI has a complex architecture and a wide range of products shows that it wants to change industries with the help of AI, blockchain, and decentralized systems. Fetch.AI is paving the way for a more connected, sustainable, and private future by making it easier to manage data securely, make transactions quickly, move around in an eco-friendly way, tokenize assets, and trust each other. Fetch.AI’s innovative solutions will change the digital landscape and give people and businesses the tools they need to make the most of new technologies.

Is FET a Good Investment?

Determining whether FET is a suitable investment for you depends on your individual situation and tolerance for risk. Cryptocurrencies are known for being high-risk assets, and it is recommended that you conduct your own research and assess the amount of risk you are comfortable with before investing. It is essential to only invest money that you can afford to lose.

How can you own FET?

Going through a centralized cryptocurrency exchange is one approach to acquiring FET. The first step is to create a Gate.io account and complete the KYC process. Once you have deposited money into your account, follow the instructions to purchase FET on the spot or futures market.

News on Fetch.ai

The Fetch.ai roadmap includes improvements to the Fetch wallet and the Fetch Station Explorer, the launch of external protocol integrations, and the introduction of new ecosystem features. Fetch.ai also has plans to launch Axim, a minimum viable product (MVP) of a collaborative learning platform, along with NFT support in the wallet, faucet support in the wallet, and several other new products and features

Take Action on FET

Users can sign up and purchase or trade FET tokens here.

Author: Piero
Translator: cedar
Reviewer(s): Matheus、Hin、Ashley He
* The information is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice or any other recommendation of any sort offered or endorsed by Gate.io.
* This article may not be reproduced, transmitted or copied without referencing Gate.io. Contravention is an infringement of Copyright Act and may be subject to legal action.
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