What is Fetch.ai (FET) and How Does It Work?

Fetch.ai is an open-source technology protocol and platform built for the emerging AI economy. It provides tools that allow users to develop, deploy, and commercialize AI-powered services; a platform designed to bridge the gap between legacy systems and the post-AI/web3 internet. 
By enabling the transformation of existing systems to become AI-ready (without requiring any changes to their current APIs or integrations), Fetch.ai facilitates the discoverability of AI services through its decentralized AI Agent network. 

This network connects different AI agents, which can interact and combine their capabilities to generate new composite services. (One of the key features is the ability to access multiple AI services through a single prompt interface.) Users don't need to integrate with each service individually. Instead, Fetch.ai combines and orchestrates different AI services seamlessly based on the user's requirements specified via a unified prompt. 

In summary, Fetch.ai aims to democratize AI by offering tools to create AI services, a network for discoverability of AI capabilities, and a way to easily combine and consume multiple AI services through a simple prompt—all while ensuring seamless integration with an organization's existing technology stack.

Fetch.ai was founded by three individuals–Toby Simpson, Humayun Sheikh, and Thomas Hain in Cambridge in 2017, as an AI research company with a focus on developing AI capabilities for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

Their core product, the Fetch.AI platform, was launched after an initial exchange offering (IEO) on March 2019, and the associated Fetch.AI mainnet went live in January 2020.

Humayun Sheikh is the Chief Executive Officer, Toby Simpson is Chief Operating Officer, and Thomas Hain is Chief 

What problem is Fetch.ai looking to solve? From their whitepaper: 

“The Internet and the services delivered via it are increasingly centralized on a few monopolistic platforms. Today’s web frameworks are conceived to cater for increasing returns to scale and winner-takes-all business models with a built-in asymmetry between users and services. Existing multi-agent and agent architectures have seen no significant adoption outside niche applications. We propose a novel agent framework which is designed to allow for a decentralised digital economy to manifest where each individual and organisation is represented by an autonomous economic entity with its own agency. The framework bridges the old and new web and employs distributed ledger technologies as core parts of its construction.”

Fetch.ai is a protocol that aims to enable the building and deployment of intelligent software agents using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology. The core idea is that despite the interconnectedness (and monopolistic tendencies) of today's internet age, there are often inefficiencies where assets are underutilized or overutilized at different times. 

Fetch.ai's solution is to develop AI-powered software agents that can cooperate and coordinate with each other in order to optimize services and networks across various entities like individuals, companies, governments, and organizations. By leveraging both AI capabilities and blockchain features like decentralization and trust, Fetch.ai envisions a system where these intelligent agents can work together seamlessly to better allocate resources, manage supply and demand, and improve overall efficiency and asset utilization. 

In essence, Fetch.ai wants to harness AI and blockchain to create a more organized and optimized ecosystem where autonomous software agents representing different parties can collaborate to provide streamlined services tailored to the needs of each user or use case.
 

How Fetch.ai Works:

Fetch.ai is an open platform comprising four integral layers that interlock to form a robust AI/blockchain ecosystem capable of handling diverse use cases across industries.

1.  AI Agents: At the core are autonomous AI Agents - intelligent programs that make independent decisions on behalf of individuals, organizations, and devices. These agents operate in decentralized environments, forming dynamic marketplaces to connect, search, transact, etc. 
2. Agentverse: The Agentverse is a SaaS platform tailored for developing, deploying, and managing AI Agent solutions. It offers a range of customizable use cases from simple to highly complex AI-driven systems.
3. AI Engine: The AI Engine bridges human inputs with AI capabilities by parsing natural language into actionable tasks executed by the most suitable AI Agents.
4. The Fetch.ai Network: The underlying infrastructure includes the Almanac contract, name service, distributed ledger, and FET tokens—supporting the entire Fetch.ai ecosystem of Agents, Agentverse, AI Engine.
    

Fetch.ai (FET) is a native cryptocurrency that powers the Fetch.ai platform, a decentralized network that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate various tasks and services. FET is used to consume services within the platform, and users can also stake their FET to participate in the governance and direction of the Fetch.ai platform. The platform's use cases extend from automating everyday tasks like booking flights to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. For instance, Fetch.ai could recognize a token trading at a lower price on one crypto exchange than others, and automatically take advantage of the difference for you. This makes FET a versatile digital asset with a wide range of applications in the growing field of decentralized AI and machine learning.

• Fetch.ai combines AI and blockchain to create a decentralized network of intelligent agents that can efficiently discover, share, and monetize AI services, datasets and device connectivity - working towards optimized machine-to-machine coordination.
• Fetch.AI is an open-source, decentralized machine learning platform built on a distributed ledger. It provides users with access to secure AI datasets and models. 
• The Fetch.ai network is powered by autonomous software agents that represent and act on behalf of their owners (individuals, companies, etc.). These AI-driven agents collaborate to optimize services across various ecosystems, benefiting both suppliers and consumers. 
• A key goal of the Fetch.AI framework is to facilitate seamless communication and coordination between billions of IoT devices in an automated and secure manner. 
• The autonomous agents have capabilities like conducting searches, negotiating terms, trading data/knowledge, sharing predictions, and transferring value with each other. 

• FET, Fetch.ai’s native token, greases the wheels of the ecosystem's operations.
   

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  Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide investment, legal, accounting, tax or any other advice and should not be relied on in that or any other regard. The information contained herein is for information purposes only and is not to be construed as an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of cryptocurrencies or otherwise.