Fetch AI
— By Frederic
One of the most trending technologies of the past few years is AI. It enabled us to automate repetitive tasks and focus on the creative process, thus boosting productivity. Another piece of tech that is booming nowadays is the blockchain, which started as just the bitcoin network. It saw a rise in its use case, especially in the finance sphere, where people started using it to store and manage files in a decentralized method. What if there could be a meeting point between those two fields? Well, that’s exactly what fetch.ai is planning to do. Fetch created a platform that connected IoT devices. It offers smart contracts in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence solutions. The best part is that it’s open-source, developers can use its tools to create and deploy commercial models.
If we are to one-day witness mobile robots delivering pizza to our doorstep in a fully autonomous way, then we would need to reimagine the whole process. Fetch found a potential solution by creating a decentralized multi-agent system. Supply chains, autonomous vehicles, and delivery networks all have access to this blockchain to ensure the delivery is completed.
An Actual Application
The delivery system is yet to be developed, but a concrete application is the taxi solution. By using smart contracts, they were successfully able to increase robustness and drastically lower fees. The client can choose his destination and set restrictions like price, duration, or car type. Fetch then matches the client with the best available driver. A smart contract is
created using the Fetch token between them. Once the driver has picked up the passenger, both agents can monitor their location to make sure the contract is being fulfilled. Once they reach their destination, and the smart contract conditions are met, the agent confirms and the funds in FET are automatically transferred. A decentralized network means that there is no central point of failure and no centralized company is holding your information. The downside of not having a company managing this is the potential risks due to the driver’s unknown identity, they don’t go through a screening, so the client will make his choice based on the community’s feedback.
We won’t dig deeper into every service Fetch is providing, some other examples include Smart Cities, Commodity exchange & decentralized finance, Collective Learning, and Smart parking & congestion solution. They are automating smart contracts that are available on the blockchain and making them accessible to the majority of the people, who can’t code a smart contract, and practically don’t have to.
The $FET Token
Fetch’s Utility Token is called FET, it’s the key to unlocking and using the Fetch ecosystem. At the time of writing this article, it has a total supply of 1.2b, nearly 65% of it is in circulation. It is available on the biggest crypto trading platforms like Binance and Coinbase. They are also providing a staking solution with a 10% APY, where you can grow your bag of FET by providing liquidity to the applications. FET uses a proof of stake mechanism, where nodes are validated by staking FET tokens. This token is required to find, create, deploy and train agents and is essential for smart contracts.
How Agents Works
The technology is inspired by a multi-agent system approach, where the problem is solved on multiple levels while using autonomous software agents. Those agents can perform
real-world actions to meet their objectives. The combination of those agents’ actions leads to the achievement of the general goal. Fetch is implementing this technology using blockchain, to achieve tasks that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, in domains like finance, transportation, or supply chain.
Fetch technology stack involves four distinct elements:
● The Agent Framework, which provides modular and reusable components for building multi-agent systems.
● The Open Economic Framework provides search and discovery functions to enable agents to find each other along with peer-to-peer networking tools for routing messages between agents.
● The Agent Metropolis is a collection of smart contracts that run on a WebAssembly (WASM) VM and that maintain an immutable record of agreements between agents and provide a variety of services to support agent applications.
● The Fetch.ai Blockchain combines novel multi-party cryptography and game theory to provide secure, censorship-resistant consensus and other features such as rapid chain-syncing to support agent applications.
Staking is supported on the Fetch blockchain, in addition to a variety of services like governance and identity, which are essential to the deployment of agent applications, by providing liquidity. Cosmos-SDK is the blockchain’s base, which offers token interoperability with other chains like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.
An Autonomous Economic Agent represents an individual, organization, or object and looks after its interests. Agents act independently of constant input from their owners and autonomously execute actions to achieve their prescribed goals. Their purpose is to create economic value for you, their owner, in clearly defined domains.
An Autonomous Economic Agent represents an individual, organization, or object and looks after its interests. Agents act independently of constant input from their owners and autonomously execute actions to achieve their prescribed goals. Their purpose is to create economic value for you, their owner, in clearly defined domains.
Where It Could Revolutionize the AI Sphere
If a developer is planning to build and train a machine learning model, he’s probably going to need huge resources, like graphic cards, and somewhere to store the data. We reached a point where the go-to solution is in the hands of a few players like AWS or Microsoft. They have enough power to provide competitive prices, but developers are restricted to working within their system and adapting the application to their specifications. That’s where fetch
could come in handy, by decentralizing this whole training process. Some possible debatable points could be companies’ will to share their private data on the blockchain, or the computing power needed to train the models in a decentralized way.
