Fetch.AI Review: AI-based Autonomous Machine Economy

The past decade has seen the rise of three powerful forces — blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, which have reshaped industries, resulting in leaner processes, and redefining the ways we interact with digital systems.

Blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is a distributed ledger system with security and transparency being its key traits. Machine learning algorithms can recognize patterns and make decisions without a human overseeing everything. Automation, meanwhile, streamlines operations and cuts down on the manual labour required for a task. 

The fusion of blockchain's security, efficiency and transparency, AI's adaptability and ability to learn and automate, and automation's limitless efficiency have the potential to transform a number of industries.

One such example is Fetch.AI, which is leveraging all three to provide an infrastructure to build smart, autonomous services. 

In this Fetch.AI review, we will touch on everything you need to know about this company.

Fetch.AI Review Summary: 

Fetch.AI is a blockchain platform that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to help automate tasks such as booking a parking space, a flight or an electric vehicle charging station. It allows anyone to build and deploy AI services at scale.

The Key Features of Fetch.AI Are:

• AI engine: The company's AI engine leverages large language models (LLM) to discover and route task execution to the relevant AI agents.
• Agent services: The company's Agentverse is the home for agent services for building, listing, analytics and hosting your AI agents.  
• Analytics: An AI Agent console helps you assess your agent's semantic descriptions and get analytical insights to improve their discoverability. This feature hasn't been rolled out yet.
• Agent Internet of Things gateway: Even if your agent is offline, they can collect messages via Fetch.AI and then process them once they're back online. 
• Fetch Hosting: You can choose Fetch.AI as a hosting platform for your agents.

Fetch.AI Overview

What is Fetch.AI?

Fetch.AI's aim is to provide the tools for developers to deploy and monetize applications by providing an autonomous machine-to-machine ecosystem. The Fetch.AI model is rooted in use cases that rely on large-scale datasets such as optimizing decentralized trading services, transportation networks and travel.  

Founded in 2017, Fetch.AI launched in 2019 following an initial exchange offering via Binance Launchpad. A total of 69,204,152 FET, its utility token, were up for sale, and they were all scooped up in a little over 11 minutes. At current prices, the sale would have fetched over $16 million. In March 2023, Fetch.AI raised $40 million, and a few months later, crypto derivatives and copy trading platform Bitget pledged $10 million to the Fetch.AI ecosystem.

The company was co-founded by Humayun Sheikh, Toby Simpson, and Thomas Hain who serve as CEO, COO and chief science officer, respectively.

Fetch.AI deploys bits of codes it calls "autonomous economic agents (AEA)" that can perform meaningful activities within the Fetch.AI network. They have the ability to act on your behalf, for example, to learn, predict and transact autonomously which can be leveraged in various contexts, such as chatbot development, industrial process automation, IOT network connectivity, DeFi, and much more. 

Some examples of the kinds of applications you can build with AEAs include:

• Automation: AEAs can automate processes in different domains, such as supply chain, mobility and finance.
• Micro-transactions: AEAs make it economically viable to execute trade involving small values.
• Wallet: AEAs can simplify interactions with blockchains. By acting as "smart wallets", they can hide away the majority of the complexities involved in using blockchains for end users.

Fetch.AI Review: Top Features

The Fetch.AI platform is loaded with various features. Let's explore!

AI Agents

Fetch.AI bills itself as the first open network for AI agents, which are modular building blocks that can be programmed with logic to perform specific tasks.

With AI Agents, you can:

• Make your legacy product AI-ready by wrapping your API in a Fetch.ai Agent
• Create new business models by chaining AI Agents together to explore new use cases and business models.
• Level up your machine-learning models as AI Agents can provide inferences from any ML models enabling you to monetize your insights.

All of this can be done through Fetch.AI's Agentverse, a no-code managed service.

Agentverse provides an accessible way to interact with and understand agents, introducing concepts such as agent discovery, remote communication, and storage. For the pros, Agentverse offers a path to prototype, test, and develop agents. Additionally, the platform serves as the hub from which you can manage your agents in the future.

The Agentverse platform guides you through the search and discovery process through which you can find and connect with other agents. You can also use the mailroom feature to set up an email-like inbox for your agent, allowing it to send and receive mail without the need for a continuous internet connection. 

AI Engine

The AI Engine leverages large language models, which drive its understanding, coordination, planning and problem-solving proficiency. The AI Engine allows users and developers to connect to a wide range of AI agent-based services. Once an agent is registered, the service is visible to the AI engine and it can start connecting users and services together. The AI Engine is powered by an internal agent to harmonize tasks seamlessly. 

Once you've defined your desired outcome, the engine takes your objective and transforms it into a series of sub-tasks. This can be unfolded autonomously or, in some cases, with the user's input to validate task selection.

Agent IoT Gateway

Also known as the Mailroom Service, this is dedicated to setting up mailboxes for your locally-run agents with the goal of not having them online all the time to communicate with one another and run them independently. Mailroom can manage incoming messages from other people and directly send them to this hosted service. You can then download them afterwards without the need for a continuous running server.

Through Mailroom, communication between agents registered in the Agentverse and local agents is possible as well. Your locally hosted agents can access the API to retrieve the information needed for communicating with the other agents registered with Agentverse.

Fetch Wallet

The Fetch Wallet is a generic wallet used for interacting with the Fetch blockchain network and other ledgers built using the Cosmos-SDK, and it supports the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. The wallet was forked from the Keplr wallet. As a result, you cannot run the two together as they interfere. If you're going to use Fetch wallet, you must first disable Keplr wallet. Private keys and mnemonics are encrypted (using Scrypt) and are stored locally on the device. This means neither Fetch.AI nor any websites you visit have access to them.

The wallet support:

• Fetch.AI's native FET token as well as IBC token transfers
• Ledger hardware wallets for enhanced security
• Multiple accounts on the Fetch ledger and other Cosmos-based ledgers

The Fetch Wallet is available for Chrome, Brave, Edge and Decentr web browsers. 

FET Token

The FET token powers the Fetch.AI ecosystem. 

FET is the utility token and the key medium of exchange on the Fetch.AI network. The token can be used to pay for services in the Fetch ecosystem and network transaction fees. Users can also choose to stake FET to participate in securing the network via its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and earn rewards in return for contributing to validator nodes.

The Fetch.AI team initially developed FET on an ERC-20 contract on the Ethereum network. However, Ethereum's widely noted scalability bottleneck did not provide the degree of scalability needed by the kinds of applications the Fetch.AI ecosystem aims for. With the launch of the Fetch.AI mainnet, the native FET became available. This meant that users operating on the Fetch.AI network no longer needed to hold a token associated with any other network. 

ERC-20 FET tokens are still in circulation and currently co-exist with native FET tokens and can be transferred from one to the other on the Fetch.AI network. All of the ERC-20 FET tokens will ultimately become native FET tokens. However, both will co-exist in the foreseeable future.

Today, FET has a market cap of $241.3 million. It is down over 80% from its all-time high price of $1.17, which it achieved in September 2021.

Artificial Superintelligence Alliance

In March 2024, Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol announced plans to merge their tokens with an aim to form what they call the "Artificial Superintelligence Alliance," where their individual tokens would combine to create a new token called Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), The Block reported.

The agreement aims to establish the largest open-sourced, independent player in AI research and development. The teams behind this move highlighted the opportunity to leverage the growing significance of AI and the expansion of their projects. They intend to build a decentralized infrastructure on a large scale and boost investment in AI.

The combination of our technologies creates a leader in R&D, applications and commercialization of AGI. The unified ASI token is the glue to orchestrate all actors with common incentives. ASI tokens are used to secure the public network, as data access tokens and to unlock computation without needing traditional banking and payment rails. It’s the native currency for the machine economy. - The Block

The projects are set to present integration proposals to their respective governance communities on March 27, marking the commencement of a 14-day consultation period. Voting on these proposals is scheduled for between April 2 and April 16.

Upon community approval, Fetch.ai (FET) is slated to transform into ASI, boasting a total supply of 2.63 billion tokens and an initial valuation of $2.82 per token. SingularityNET (AGIX) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) will migrate to ASI at conversion rates of approximately 0.43335 to 1 and 0.433226 to 1, respectively. This amalgamated ASI token is projected to hold a fully diluted value of $7.5 billion, based on prevailing market prices, according to The Block.

A governing council, named the "Superintelligence Collective," is set to be formed to oversee and steer the operations of the merged tokenomic network. SingularityNET founder Ben Goertzel is designated as the CEO of the Superintelligence Collective, while Fetch.ai founder Humayun Sheikh will serve as chairman. Additionally, Bruce Pon and Trent McConaghy will represent Ocean Protocol on the council.

It is imperative, as the AI revolution intensifies, to ensure that AGI and ASI as they develop are not owned and controlled by any particular party with its biased interests. They should be rolled out in an open, democratic and decentralized way. This has been the joint vision of SingularityNET, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol from their inception, and for this reason, it makes total sense that our three projects come together to form a tokenomic network that has greater power to take on Big Tech and shift the center of gravity of the AI world into the decentralized ecosystem. - The Block

Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol Foundation, and SingularityNET Foundation will remain independent organizations. However, they will collaborate closely within the shared ASI tokenomic ecosystem and in managing the operations of the Superintelligence Collective.

Fetch.AI Partnerships

Partnerships have become a necessity in today's dynamic business environment. These strategic alliances extend beyond the traditional notion of mergers and acquisitions.

Here are a few notable collaborations Fetch.AI has struck:

• Bosch and Fetch.AI formed a new Web3 foundation called the Fetch.ai Foundation, whose goal is to research, develop and harness Web3 for real-world use cases across the mobility, industrial and consumer verticals.
• Crypto liquidity platform ZoidPay extended its services to FET token holders, who can enjoy a monthly purchase limit of €100,000 a month.
• A partnership with fiat-on-ramp company Indacoin allows FET community members to buy native FET tokens using credit and debit cards in more than 180 countries.
• Fetch.AI partnered with professional esports organization Immortals to increase crypto adoption in the esports landscape.

Fetch.AI Review: Closing Thoughts

Leveraging the transparency, efficiency and security of blockchain, the adaptability of AI, and the efficiency of automation, Fetch.AI has pioneered an infrastructure that facilitates the automation of everyday tasks, from booking parking spaces to managing electric vehicle charging stations. Its innovative approach empowers developers to deploy and monetize applications within an autonomous machine-to-machine ecosystem.

Key features of Fetch.AI, such as its AI engine and Agentverse, showcase the platform's commitment to providing comprehensive AI-driven solutions. Moreover, its native token, FET, fuels the ecosystem's transactions and incentivizes participation through staking. In a world marked by the fusion of blockchain, AI, and automation, Fetch.AI stands as a testament to the transformative potential of partnerships and technological innovation.