Fetch.ai AMA Recap

CryptoDiffer team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here

CEO at Fetch.ai Humayun Sheikh (@HumayunSheikh)

and

COO at Fetch.ai Toby Simpson (@cobrascobras)

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Hi Everyone

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

It’s great to be here, thanks for having us.

CryptoDiffer team

Let`s start with introduction:

Q1) Can you introduce yourself to our community ?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Hello, I’m the CEO of Fetch.ai and one of the project co-founders. Prior to Fetch.ai I was involved in commodity trading and developing ML and AI techniques for commodity trading. I have always been involved with new technology and was an early investor in the AI company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for $650m in 2014.

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Sure! I’m Toby, COO and co-founder of Fetch.ai. My background is computer games, including large-scale simulations, artificial intelligence and artificial life. I learnt how to create scaleable systems using an agent based approach in the 90s: creating worlds that could grow to infinite size as part of my goal at the time of putting The Matrix in my living room 🙂 Fetch.ai is a real-world example of this bottom-up, agent-based approach to solving complexity.

CryptoDiffer team

Q2: Can you briefly tell us what is Fetch.ai in 3-5 sentences?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Fetch is building a base layer to enable ‘machine learning, AI and autonomous multi agent system’ for the decentralised world. As complexity of systems is increasing such a system enables intelligent interactions and connectivity.

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

3-5 sentences, eh? I’ll take 5 🙂

Fetch enables an autonomous digital economy. It lets all the part of the economy play together as a form of AI and economic Lego. The key part of this is autonomous economic agents: these are digital representives of stuff, such as data, people, services, knowledge, IoT devices and more, and they can act on behalf of their owner or on their own behalf to get things done. Fetch acts as a smart, self-adapting “dating agency” that learns how to connect agents together so that they can get useful work done.

Just about anything that’s a large collection of moving parts can benefit from this: financial services can optimise trading, transport networks can be better and more efficient for their users, supply chains optimised… it’s all about getting better use out of what we have to make our day-to-day lives easier. With this technology, we can disintermediate things to return value to the value providers and build, for example, a true decentralised ride-hailing and delivery service.

CryptoDiffer team

Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved and about your upcoming plans?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

In the end it was more like 7-9, so sorry about that

Well, I think we’ve all heard comments about how a certain virus has generally made the world a strange and somewhat grimmer place, but we’ve been able to make excellent progress. We’re transitioning now from research and development towards deployment of commercial projects. This is super-exciting for us: things like Mettalex, Atomix, the decentralised delivery network, work we’re doing in hospitality and with augmented reality for self-driving cars and so, so much more. We’ve also done some great stuff with collective learning which we’re super pleased about.

Sorry about the link-dump, but for those interested in learning more:

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

We’ve also announced several partnerships including:

Cambridge University: Fetch is engaged in a partnership with Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing to develop supply chain use cases with AI multi-agent systems and their next-generation blockchain.

T-Labs: (The R&D unit of T Mobile) In May 2019 Fetch announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with T-Labs, the R&D unit of Deutsche Telekom. Fetch.ai has conducted a number of trials with the T-Labs team in mobility, smart cities and autonomous driving

Baştuğ Metallurgy: In October 2019 Fetch announced a partnership with Turkish steelmakers including Baştuğ Metallurgy to develop the first AI-powered decentralized metals exchange and recorded the historic first trade on the exchange.

Warwick Business School: Fetch.ai is conducting trials with Warwick Business School that showed that the autonomous agents could reduce daily energy costs at Warwick University’s student campus by 13–18%.

AI Innovation Network: Fetch.ai is a current industry partner with the AIIN focused on research into, and the impact of decentralized, distributed intelligence

Grey Swan Digital: Autonomous agents are allowing users to set alerts for specific trading opportunities, manage customer positions in Grey Swan fungible objects, provide liquidity within user specified risk constraints, manage collateral in Grey Swan’s platform, and perform risk-based lending to traders on the Grey Swan platform.

Smart Dubai: Fetch.ai is contributing towards the vision and delivery of the Dubai Decentralised Data program sponsored by Smart Dubai Data

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

And also a couple of blog posts re. the self-driving cars and decentralised delivery network:

https://medium.com/@toby.simpson/the-courchevel-test-for-self-driving-vehicles-the-impossible-challenge-d45477667c9

https://medium.com/@toby.simpson/people-pizzas-and-packages-a-delivery-network-for-the-21st-century-50e6218e748f

CryptoDiffer team

Awesome, a lot of updates to come out!

Thank you for great answers!

I think it is time to start community questions round!

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the function of Artificial Intelligence or AI in Fetch.ai in your platform? What makes you decide to use this kind of technology program in your platform?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

We use and enable AI.

We use AI to learn how to connect agents: and we’re building some exciting stuff relating to dimensional reduction that makes this super cool for “finding things like this”, i.e., smart fuzzy searches.

We also have a unique collective learning system: this allows lots of people to contribute to a model without having to disclose private or confidential data. In healthcare, this is super important as so much data cannot be disclosed. In business it is also useful: companies can contribute to their greater good without disclosing what is confidential to them.

Then there’s agents that can deliver insights, knowledge and information to other network users. Fetch connects them together to deliver this — true AI Lego.

Cryptodiffer Community

Few hours ago, you announced a partnership with Waves Tech. Could you explain more about this partnership and how it’s going to impact blockchain as a whole?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

The whole decentralised space will need ML and AI solutions ultimately and our objective is to provide ability to run these tasks . Our partnership is to enable such capability for Waves tech. You will see a lot of projects will be able to use Fetch’s platform to deploy agents or run complex machine learning tasks which will be an essential for the DeFi space.

Cryptodiffer Community

Why did you choose to build the FET token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not on a scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum has many scalability issues?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

The key is to provide interoperability. Our chain will solve the scalability issues but majority of transactions are still based on Ethereum and the trick is to integrate with all chains.

Cryptodiffer Community

The key is to provide interoperability. Our chain will solve the scalability issues but majority of transactions are still based on Ethereum and the trick is to integrate with all chains.

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Good questions.

1. In the end, as I say a lot, people just want to get things done and get them done better and more effectively than before. Nobody really cares about what’s under the hood: it’s what it does, not what it is.

And this is important in commercial applications. When we look at complex networks that are inefficient, if we can show that we optimise that and make it better, saving money, increasing robustness and increasing flexibility, it’s a powerful message. So yes, we do have a strategy, and it is working and showing in the relationships we’re building and the solutions we’re working on.

2. Agreed. FET is the fundamental fuel for agents to get things done. It powers smart contracts, collective AI, it powers search in the digital world and it is the unit of value exchange. As the agent population grows, so does the use of the token in driving that community.

Cryptodiffer Community

Is it really possible to solve daily problems with AI/ML Blockchain? Why do we need blockchain for this purpose?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Our aspiration is to build a mass collective learning platform. To build such a thing you need to have a Multi-Agent system where all participants and stakeholders can work together and Blockchain is the best example of Multi Agent System.

Cryptodiffer Community

I recently read that Fetch.ai is working on a loan platform that would grant loans against physical assets, what are the requirements that users must meet to use this loan and what is the interest percentage?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

This platform is still under development and the conditions will vary with various jurisdictions. We will reveal more info over time, watch this space!

Cryptodiffer Community

What has been FET contributions to the recent COVID-19 so far, in FET , in research and other relevant ways?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Nothing specifically, but collective learning would have potentially been very useful. Agent-based approaches to modelling and AI are very powerful, and we’re looking to showing how it can be deployed in the future (although hopefully none of us will see anything like this again in our lifetimes)

However, there are other sociatal benefits to this stuff, one of which is for the environment. By making better use of the assets that we have in the economy, we are able to do more but with less. We’re very wasteful, particularly with data, but also with infrastructure use. Fetch agents can optimise this at a local level, as we’ve shown for car parking, electric car charging, congestion optimisation, travel and ride-hailing, etc.

Cryptodiffer Community

Can you talk about mettalex we expect launch this week or some big news on it why is their constant delay ?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Good things come to those… Mettalex is a complex platform not only technologically but also from a regulation point of view. We have to make sure we do things right and sometimes that causes delays. It is coming please bear with us.

Cryptodiffer Community

Is management aware of the tax framework and implications?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

I’m not quite sure what you meant, but if it is relating to understanding the issues of tax and regulation, then yes. Indeed, we play an active part in working with governments and regulators as part of our founding membership of Blockchain for Europe in helping guide these policies. Tax needs to be well understood and easy to deal with, so that it isn’t a burden to work with, as does regulation.

How to not catch fire: a short, pleasant road to reasonable crypto regulation

Cryptodiffer Community

How successfully have you been able to combine Artificial Intelligence and DeFi. Do you think they can coexist and what’s FETCH ultimate DeFi solution?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

As DeFi matures it will require ML/AI capability for example Market making , order matching, collateralisation intelligence, pricing etc. Fetch’s ML framework will enable these projects to use this capability.

Cryptodiffer Community

It’s obvious that data cannot sell itself, so what’s Fetch AI’s solution to make data more valuable?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

I’d take issue with that. Data can sell itself. If it is represented by an autonomous agent, that agent can get out there and find uses for that data directly or indirectly, and that’s a key part of what we’re doing with Fetch: these are not dumb data marketplaces, these are active, alive places where agents are getting things done without human intervention.

Imagine if when you opened your eyes, all you saw was precisely what you needed to see to lead a happy, peaceful and productive life? Well, in reality, we can’t do that, but in a digital world we can: each autonomous agent sees a view that is unique to them. Adapted perfectly so that they can get the work they need to do done with the minimum of friction, delays or problems. That is why we combined blockchain and AI: so that we could allow billions of these agents to work effectively to solve problems for you. We can organise travel for you, we can change the way energy works and we can help businesses to eliminate inefficiencies.

… but either way, I’d argue that data is now able to get up on its own two feet and finally sell itself. It’s what takes the waste out of the economy, and oh my do we throw away a lot of data 🙂

https://medium.com/fetch-ai/a-decentralised-virtual-world-of-the-future-61d4ecb16b9f

Cryptodiffer Community

DeFi is one of the hottest topic in the blockchain space right now. Can you share your opinion about DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is FET approach towards the DeFi sector?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Defi is definitely a game changer and we have been working on this since we started, our commodities derivatives exchange Mettalex is an example but Fetch provides the ability for DeFi projects to use the ML/AI capabilities to make further development

Cryptodiffer Community

Why did you choose to build the FET token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not on a scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum has many scalability issues?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Good question!

ERC-20 is where the FET token lives right now. It’s a reliable, well-understood system and all the tools (exchange support, hardware wallets, end-point services, smart-contract support, block explorers, etc., etc.) exist and are mature.

But we’ve also got our own blockchain, because we need it. With potentially millions of agents transacting and using contracts and AI to do their work, we need to support a lot of transactions per second, and ethereum can’t do this. This is why we have our native mainnet and soon our new native mainnet V2 (and you can interact with it now, we call it Agentland). With the Fetch technology driving it, with the world for agents, our amazing decentralised random beacon and a ton of other things, it’s designed for agents and DeFi.

The ERC20 token isn’t going anywhere, as it’s possible to swap one for the other, and the general support framework (as mentioned above) is very good, it’s just that it doesn’t scale, smart contracts are limited and transaction costs have been… well… eye watering recently!

Cryptodiffer Community

We see more and more Defi appearing based on Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum also plans to build its own version 2.0 to solve the scalability problem. So, what is Fetch.io’s plan to develop DEFI and solve the scalability problem?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Overall we think Ethereum and others including Fetch will solve the scalability problem, our solution is to provide these projects tools to carry out complex ML calculations and that is our core focus.

Cryptodiffer Community

What kind of advantages does Fetch.ai have over its competitors on the market?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

We’re different. (edited to add: in a nice way, obviously :))

We set out to solve a different problem: how can we create something where autonomous agents can represent everything in the economy, and then how can we connect things together so they can get their work done better? We needed scale, robustness, adaptability and more, and whilst we understood the AI and ML necessary to do that, blockchain provided a key component to getting it working. So we’ve got:

* Unique collective learning

* Environment to connect agents together that adapts in real-time

* Autonomous Economic Agents (and a really, really good framework for developing them)

* A uniquely cool decentralised random beacon contributing to consensus and DeFi

* Interopability in the form of AI and economic Lego so all these parts can be combined to do amazing things (including making use of and working with other protocols and systems)

Cryptodiffer Community

From FETCH AI TEAM’s point of view, do you think having a token sale on Bitfinex is necessary and for what reason? Because most community members and long-term investors see this action as another cause of the FET market value disposal and will have a negative impact on the real FET value?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Firstly, it’s a really tiny number of tokens representing a very, very small amount of the circulating supply.

Secondly, it’s a truly fantastic opportunity to expand Fetch’s reach into a new audience, which is super-good for the community as a whole. It has let us reach new developers, new supporters, introduced us to new commercial partners and opportunities, which is all great for us all. It has been great working with Bitfinex’s excellent team on this, and we’re delighted to be listed there and for this small sale to take place.

Thirdly, anyone can take part, including existing supporters.

Cryptodiffer Community

Your tag line “make it happen” what has really Happened with FETCH? AND WHAT REALLY IS FETCH MAKING TO HAPPEN IN TERMS OF UTILITY AND REAL LIFE USE CASE?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

So have a look at some of our real use cases :

Cryptodiffer Community

Q: I want to learn more about Fetch, but the information is very small, most of Fetch social networks are less active, the community is relatively empty and less, what strategy does Fetch team have to develop the community and maintain long-term user?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

This AMA is part of the strategy. We do have a developer slack channel :

https://fetch-ai.slack.com/join/shared_invite/enQtNDI2MDYwMjE3OTQwLWY0ZjAyYjM0NGQzNWRhNDMxMzdjYmVhYTE3NDNhNTAyMTE0YWRkY2VmOWRmMGQ3ODM1N2NjOWUwNDExM2U3YjY#/

Fetch.ai has issued a fixed number (1,152,997,575) of non-divisible tokens that are used on the network as the digital currency for all transactions. As agents buy and sell data they do so with FET tokens, therefore as use of the data marketplace increases so too demand for the token grows. In certain circumstances, node operators and agents must also provide FET tokens for operations on the network such as secure communication between agents, other actions require tokens be provided as a refundable deposit.
We’ve set out some of the utility of the FET token here: https://medium.com/fetch-ai/explaining-fet-the-fetch-ai-token-with-five-simple-examples-195a66ad9438
Ultimately, FET is the fuel for deploying solutions in the Fetch.ai network, and as such is integral to the use cases outlined on the website: https://fetch.ai/use-cases/. DeFi, transport and mobility, energy and supply chains are just some of the use cases for our technology. HODL FET and the demand for the token should only increase. For example, in the case of Mettalex (the upcoming metals and commodities exchange powered by Fetch.ai), FET tokens will be used as a percentage of collateral required for the creation of commodity tokens.

Cryptodiffer Community

Marketing is a central element for every project, so that everyone knows the potential that a project can bring is vital to achieve the goals set. What is your strategy to attract new users and investors to Fetch and keep them long term?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

You are absolutely right.

Hopefully you’ll have seen the massive effort we’ve been making on this recently. As we move towards more commercial deployments, we’re interacting more with the community, with developers, and producing a lot of news on how we’re progressing. We continue increase our efforts in this space because it’s vital.

As we go forwards, we continue to show the opportunities for Fetch: new applications, new projects and new opportunities, all of which grow the community as a whole. We’re also looking forward to more in-person meet-ups, hackathons and conferences when that becomes possible again, but in the meanwhile we’re doing AMAs, interviews and more to interact with our existing users and community and attract more people to the unique things you can do with Fetch.

And, of course, we’ve only just started!

Cryptodiffer Community

Can you share ideas when developing #Fetch.ai? What makes you use blockchain technology to do those ideas?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Sure.

Blockchain enables the scale we need. It allows us to maintain a large-scale decentralised network, and provides the incentive and value-exchange mechanism necessary to make it work. With it, we can build a network of any size we want, to support a growing population of autonomous agents.

And combined with other cryptographic technologies, such as those that do zero-knowledge proofs, or multi-party computation and more, we’re able to deliver other things that we want to like working in a trusted environment for non-centralised ride-hailing and delivery platforms. It also enables our unique collective learning that I talked about earlier in this AMA.

Cryptodiffer Community

What are the main improvements that have been implemented in the new version of Agent Framework? What features do you expect to add in the future?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Well, we’re up to 0.5.4 and 0.6 is coming out soon, with v1 due before the end of the year. Each time we release a new version we take on board users’ suggestions and follow our own roadmap to make it better, faster and easier to use.

We’ve done a lot of work with documentation and examples, and we’ve tried to make it so that less and less programming is required to achieve more and more, and we’re certainly succeeding on that front. One day, it’ll be possible to create agents with drag-and-drop and it’ll be as easy as developing in Scratch to add functionality.

Cryptodiffer Community

Is your aim, to become the number one (leader) in the Artificial Intelligence platform ? and if so what will you say is your biggest strength to achieve it?

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

yes, and the first and most important component is the team and we are proud of our team and what they have achieved

Cryptodiffer Community

Q: How does FETCH solve the Scalability problem, how do I achieve high THROUGHPUT on Layer 2 using FETCH

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Scalability is a complex problem, but it’s one that is essential we get right, as otherwise our network will never be able to support the billions of micro-transactions that will be made by autonomous agents. Fortunately, we have a world-leading team and we’re confident we’ve developed an ecosystem that is truly scalable. You can read about our solution here: https://medium.com/fetch-ai/the-future-of-consensus-proof-of-stake-with-unpermissioned-delegation-2c398b9381fb and here https://medium.com/fetch-ai/design-of-the-fetch-ai-scalable-ledger-fde2e23e362f

Cryptodiffer Community

How does Fetch contribute to blockchain technology?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

In many ways. Firstly, we’re contributing some great technology that others can use. And we’re building a network that’s fundamentally interopable with others. Our agents can work with all sorts of different things, for example. And we’re working with other technologies to improve what they can do, too, based on what we develop and learn. It’s a great space to be in and it’s greater when we work together.

We’re also contributing by showing how autonomous economic agents and aspects of AI and ML can be driven by blockchain based technologies to do more and more commercially useful activities, as we’ve shown in a number of projects recently

Cryptodiffer Community

A failure of the centralized server could cause catastrophic results to the transaction-based system.

What you have done To facilitate a demand for higher speed as traditionally all the transactions were processed by centralized servers.

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Which is why decentralised technology is so important. Single points of failure are disasterous, and also tend to involve centralised complexity, too. Truly decentralised solutions solve this: it’s like the original Internet (well, Arpanet) dream — nodes can come and go, but nobody cares, the network holds together at a local level and can route smartly to get where it needs to go. With blockchain based decentralisation we get that, so long as there are incentives to keep decentralised and not accidentally go the other way (which is what’s happened with the Internet: increasingly centralised infrastructure and applications, which, if nothing else, is ironic).

Cryptodiffer Community

Checking your website on Decentralized Train Network, if there any problem occurs on railway system, how would handle via your solutions? How far “decentralized” it could be?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

The train stuff is very cool and we continue to expand that. Ultimately, those agents will be a key part of delivering the decentralised delivery network as an option for delivering things and people from one place to another.

As we add more to it, the population of agents grows, and the kind of insights that you can derive from it get broader. We’re very encouraged by what AI/ML can establish from the data that is there, and, of course, anyone can interact with these agents and get the value that they’re providing.

But to answer your note about decentralised: it is 100% decentralised. Each train and station agent is independent, and as we add crossings, junctions, bridges, tunnels, etc., then we can do even more and provide some really interesting options for the train companies and railway infrastructure operators as they can learn how to optimise their operations, but also, get some new overall views that might be very useful in diagnosing and dealing with faults.

We did a great crowdcast about this recently. Let me dig up the link.

Ah, there we go:

Cryptodiffer Community

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

We want more participants to join the Fetch ecosystem and raise further awareness for the FET token. Bitfinex sale is 0.09% of the total supply.

Cryptodiffer Community

How does #Fetch.ai rate the importance of the user community?

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

Easy one: we rate it as very, very important — this stuff can’t happen without it, developers, those that are interested, supporters, etc., it’s vital.

COO at Fetch.ai, Toby Simpson

It’s our pleasure. Thanks for having us!

Cryptodiffer TEAM

Awesome!

thank you @HumayunSheikh @cobrascobras for great answers!

CEO at Fetch.ai, Humayun Sheikh

Pleasure!

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