What is Fetch AI?

If you’ve been watching the crypto markets by market cap recently, you will have noticed a few projects breaking into the top 100 by market cap. One is Fetch.AI, also known by its market ticker, FET.

Surprisingly, Fetch isn’t a new crypto project and has actually been on the market since 2019.

Created by Toby Simpson and Humayun Sheikh in 2017, Fetch.ai aims to enable the creation of smart contracts, decentralized applications (dApps), and other digital services through artificial intelligence (AI).

The purpose of Fetch.ai is to enable the creation of autonomous economic agents, which are digital entities that can interact with each other and the world in a decentralized manner.

These AI agents can perform tasks such as data analysis, machine learning, prediction and can be used in various industries such as finance, transportation, and health.

Fetch.ai is unique among other blockchains because of its focus on combining blockchain technology with AI. Given the recent rise of Dall-E, Midjourney, ChatGPT, and many other AI projects, its perhaps no surprise a new interest has been found in Fetch.ai.

It has been a while since I have talked about a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain, but this is where Fetch.ai gets its foundations.

However, unlike most Cosmos-SDK blockchains, Fetch.ai runs a modified version to allow integration of its AI components. These variations also allow Fetch.ai to serve as a layer-1 network for Ethereum and an interchain bridge for other blockchains.

Currently, Fetch.ai runs a modified version of Cosmos’ Tendermint Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism to verify its transactions.

Like all other Cosmos-based blockchains, it is fully interoperable with any blockchain built using the Cosmos-SDK thanks to its Inter Blockchain Communication protocol, or IBC.

In the end, there will be a transition to Fetch.ai’s Smart Ledger, which will be a combination of Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, and Direct Acrylic Graph.

The end result is a blockchain capable of processing up to 30,000 transactions per second, at least if their testnet results can be repeated on their live mainnet.

For comparison, Ethereum’s transactions per second are only in the double digits, making FET lightning-fast in terms of tps.

Fetch.ai is quite refreshing, as it does quite a lot uniquely. The biggest element is AI, though it also extends far beyond this.
The applications being built on the Fetch.ai platform are often as unique as the blockchain they are running on.

For example, the Fetch.ai platform utilizes Collective Learning.
A technique that enables individuals to work together to train machine learning without sharing any of the underlying data with any of the individual participants.

So far, these have been used in medicine for Covid-19 and cancer cell detection and in machinery providing predictive maintenance.

Thanks to Fetch.AI, multiple health sector participants trained a machine learning algorithm to detect Covid-19 in chest x-rays, which remarkably came away with a 90% accuracy rating.

In addition to this, working with Poznan Supercomputer Networking Center both the PSNC and Fetch.ai will work together to train algorithms to detect cancer cells in patients through blood samples and tissue biopsies.
These algorithms will then be made available for use by hospitals and research centers worldwide.

Finally, Fetch.ai has partnered with Bosch to provide predictive maintenance on their products.
This is a process that identifies potential failures within the machine itself, based on machine learning from Fetch.ai’s Collective Learning.

As you can imagine, with its platform being used in cutting-edge technology and potentially life-saving research, interest in the project has spiked recently.

But as we all know, projects live and die by their tokenomics. So how does FET hold up to its competitors?

In total, there will only ever be 1.15 billion FET tokens. Currently, around 750 million of them are available on the market.

Originally, these were released as ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum network when they launched back in 2019.

However, when the Fetch mainnet went live, the native FET token was born. The native FET token and the ERC-20 token version of FET work side-by-side and are easily interchangeable with one another.

Eventually, all ERC-20 FET tokens will be replaced with native FET tokens, but for the foreseeable future, the two FET tokens will continue to coexist alongside each other.

FET is the primary medium of exchange for the Fetch.ai ecosystem, and it is used to pay for transactions, smart contracts, data exchanges, and as a medium of exchange.
As with other Cosmos SDK-based blockchains, these FET tokens can be staked to the network to earn a reward proportional to how much you have staked.

Further, of the 1.15 billion, 20% went to the Foundation that looks after the blockchain.
A further 20% went to the Founders and Team. 6% was sold during a public ICO, and a further 6% was sold during a private sale. An additional 5% was also sold during a later seed sale.

Advisors were given 10%, and 15% was allocated for staking rewards. Lastly, around 18% of the FET tokens are being held for future releases.

In conclusion, Fetch.ai aims to bring AI platforms and services that let anyone build and deploy AI services at scale, anytime, and anywhere.

Fetch.ai is an interesting project that seems to have legitimately picked up traction recently. It’s clear that AI learning is here to stay, and certain investors are looking at technologies that embrace it.

The FET token aims to be the fuel to an ecosystem that is powered by AI and without much human intervention or oversight. Of course, the recent rise of AI-based programs and how disruptive they have become has led to an interest in Fetch.ai. But, by using their platform to provide humanity with new tools that can potentially help detect cancer and predict mechanical faults, it is clear that it is not only the rise of recent AI programs that has caused interest in Fetch.AI.