A Year in Review: Fetch.AI 2020 Summary

2020 has been a year like no other with the COVID-19 pandemic dominating headlines around the world and our collective lives literally in every sense possible. However, we wanted to take a rare moment away from the doom and gloom to focus on what good has come from 2020 for fetch.ai.

Field Trials

Smart City Field Trials

In partnership with Datarella, we announced the launch of our Smart City Field Trials. Using AI-agents to optimize resource usage and reduce the city’s carbon footprint, we predict that mass implementation of smart-city infrastructure will result in 34,000 tonne annual Co2 emission reduction.

The smart city zoning trial in Munich, Germany, will launch in Connex Buildings and will utilize multi-agent blockchain-based AI digitization services to unlock data and provide smart mobility solutions in its commercial real estate properties in the city center.

Upon implementation, Fetch.ai AEAs (Autonomous Economic Agents) will support the sustainable and efficient use of city infrastructure in Munich through an application where they will autonomously negotiate the ‘price’ of parking spaces between the holders of them, and those looking for a space. Users can earn rewards in digital currency if they choose less popular or in-demand parking spaces (or do not use the parking lot at all on some days).

We were thrilled this announcement received great media attention with fast company, ZDnet and many more covering the story.

Collective Learning Covid-19 Field Trials

We recently announced the Fetch.ai Collective Learning Covid-19 Field Trials.

Our collective learning network delivers a secure, global AI model to detect COVID-19 and is improving health outcomes. The tool enables distributed parties to work together to train machine learning models without sharing the underlying data. Multiple global participants can train and benefit from the model.

The nodes in this experiment are located in Los Angeles and London clusters but new results in one location can benefit all! We hope to see nodes on every continent eventually. New hospitals / healthcare institutions around the world are invited to join. The project achieved 97% diagnostic accuracy.

Thank you to Forbes for providing us with extra coverage of the project.

Mobility Framework Field Trails

We recently launched our brand new mobility framework. It’s open to everyone and it’s open now. Decentralized solutions built with autonomous economic agents could return 20–30% of mobility’s revenue directly to the local economy, delivering a hyper-local service through a common user-focussed experience. This, alongside combining all forms of delivery and mobility (regulated or not) into new business opportunities, forms the heart of our exciting new Mobility Framework.

The recent launch is the first part of releasing documentation, code and working examples that allow everyone to take part in the new, decentralised mobility future; with it, combining our previous work in trains, delivery solutions and self-driving vehicles. Find out more now.

Hospitality Field Trials

We have been working hard behind the scenes and will be releasing exciting updates in January 2021. Watch this space.

New Partnerships

Despite tough restrictions, we have had a year of vast collaboration and have overcome physical barriers to develop a variety of exciting partnerships. Alongside the field trials above, here are some of the highlights:

1. Fetch.ai partners with Cudo to deliver machine learning services at scale. The partnership will also cover scaling out Fetch.ai network validation.
2. Hegic launches “Autonomous Hegician” options trading tool built on Fetch.ai Autonomous Agent Framework. The Autonomous Hegician application will eliminate concerns associated with expired contracts for users of the Hegic protocol by automatically executing option trades that are about to expire.
3. Fetch.ai partners with Conflux to power global AI commerce. The partnership paves the way for adoption of AI and cross chain interoperability among blockchain-based systems.
4. We announced a partnership between Waves and Fetch.ai. The Fetch.ai team is becoming a significant collaborator of Waves with an aim to conduct joint R&D for the purpose of bringing increased multi-chain capabilities to Fetch.ai’s system of autonomous economic agents (AEAs).
5. We partnered with Warwick Business School to create a machine learning solution that suggests daily energy costs would fall by 13–18% on the student campus.
6. Fetch.ai Integrates Chainlink Oracles Live on Mainnet, Connecting Real-World Asset Price Data To Autonomous Software.
7. Fetch.ai partners with 0chain enabling Fetch.ai to scale its autonomous agent functionalities via 0chain’s proprietary data storage solutions.

Complete list of partners announced this year:

Cudo, Cambridge University, T-Labs, Baştuğ Metallurgy, Warwick Business School, Wi-Q technologies, Hegic, Conflux Network, Waves, Ankr, Grey Swan Digital, Sovrin Steward, Smart Dubai with Outlier Ventures, Trusted IoT Alliance, Blockchain 4 Europe, 0chain.

Interoperability

We announced our interoperability vision to bring machine learning services to every ledger and all chains. We began by launching agentland in the journey towards full interoperability — the first step in this journey was achieved by integrating our agent technology with the Cosmos ecosystem, which enabled cross-chain transfers to bridge Ethereum with Cosmos-hub and many other application-specific chains. The Agentland network also uses the Cosmwasm VM which provides fast, language agnostic and interoperable smart contracts for agent applications.

We built on this by incorporating a new performance-focused FET virtual machine to our testnet, based on WebAssembly. The Fetch.ai virtual machine was upgraded on the test network, along with new documentation to enable agent developers to prepare for the migration onto the live network.

To help further prepare for the launch of mainnet v2.0, we launched our incentivized testnet program.

Incentivized Testnet

We launched a program of activities to prepare for and test the technology for the Fetch.ai mainnet v2.0. It is still ongoing and we are even offering over 1 million FET in rewards for getting involved.

The first phase, agent world, was a huge success. Thanks to the 125 developers and teams who supported the Agent World testnet. We achieved and learned more than we could have hoped for.

Some quick statistics to give you all a sense of the scale

• Total search queries: 608,070
• Total agents ever on the network: 224,346
• Total number of agents found by other agents: 1,025,693 (some agents found more than once)
• Highest number of agents online at once: 1,219

The map below was just a randomly timed screenshot that shows some of the agents we had popping up all over the world.

However, this was just the start. We have now launched the second phase, beacon world. No developer experience is needed so we encourage you to get involved now and help shape the future of Fetch.ai.

New Use Cases

Our technology has the potential to revolutionize a multitude of industries, improving efficiency through optimization of existing systems. Enhancing and optimizing solutions to everyday problems through intelligent data sharing, machine learning and AI. This year we have developed a range of new use cases to highlight the potential of the fetch.ai network.

• Home energy agents — A study by Fetch.ai and Imperial College London has demonstrated how Fetch.ai’s autonomous agents can use a new deep reinforcement learning technique to lower daily domestic energy costs by nearly 20%.
• Decentralized Taxi Network — Developed by the winner of one of last year’s Fetch.ai hackathon competitions, the demo demonstrates how taxi services could be optimized through the use of Fetch.ai’s decentralized network.
• Thermometer agents — Agents can use what we call thermometer skills. In a world of artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT innovations and buzzwords, this may not sound that exciting. But the potential it unlocks is.
• Car parking agents — In a smart city, rather than driving into a parking lot hoping to find a space, an autonomous agent within your car will search and communicate with parking agents to find the nearest available space to your destination, book it for you before directing you to it. When you come back to your car and drive off, your car agent checks out of the parking lot, calculates the payment and makes it for you, removing the hassle of parking tickets.
• Smart Cities — Smart Cities will see billions of devices find and communicate with each other to make the best decision for users. This will revolutionize the way we consume energy, water and dispose of waste, how we move around within cities, as well as making them safer places to live in.
• We launched our Random Number Beacon on Binance Smart Chain. Utilizing Fetch.ai’s ledger staking, P2P networking, and transaction recording capabilities, the new GLOW-DRB product will provide unstoppable random number service for decentralized applications.

You can check out our full range of use cases here

Mettalex

In 2020, we announced Mettalex — the world’s first autonomous marketing making-powered DEX focused on token-based commodities trading. Accessible 24/7/365 with tight trading spreads, low margin requirements and unique hedge instruments, the Mettalex exchange ensures that users don’t get liquidated prior to settlement dates. Designed to address the risk-management needs of physical commodity holders, Mettalex brings 10+ unique commodity derivatives trading pairs to the decentralized finance space. At launch Mettalex users will get access to markets in iron, copper, aluminium, lithium carbonate, oil, gold, silver, among others. Liquidity providers will be able to lend their USD-denominated tokens (USDT) to earn a percentage of the trading fees and enjoy an additional yield in MTLX tokens. All that without surrendering custody of their funds to a centralized entity.

Alongside the project announcement, we introduced and distributed the MTLX token, ran a liquidity rewards program and are currently in the process of running our Early Access Program to prepare for the launch in 2021. We recently announced a partnership with Binance Smart Chain, which will enable significantly lower transaction fees for commodity derivatives traders and liquidity providers.

As part of the Early Access Program, we are planning to hold two simulated trading competitions — one on Ethereum’s Kovan testnet and one on Binance Smart Chain’s testnet. If you are a trader or simply want to experience commodity derivatives trading on Mettalex’s beta platform, risk-free — register here. The winners will be rewarded with more than 2000 of Mettalex’s governance token MTLX.

Atomix

We didn’t stop at just Mettalex, we also brought you Atomix.ai — Atomix is a groundbreaking Fetch.ai powered decentralized finance lending platform. Atomix creates liquidity through the introduction of tokens evidencing security taken over real world assets, enabling efficient and flexible collateralized lending for Borrowers, whilst delivering returns for Lenders. Check out the litepaper.

Agent Framework Progress

The AEA framework is a Python-based development suite which equips you with an efficient and accessible set of tools for building AEAs. The framework is modular, extensible, and composable. It attempts to make agent development as straightforward an experience as possible, similar to web development using popular web frameworks.

We started this year at agent framework 0.1.16 and after 29 new releases, we are now at agent framework 0.8.0.

To help support this progress, we developed a new Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA) registry that will allow you to build agents and participate in this new digital economy far more easily. The aim was to develop an effective “App Store” for developers that allows you to access and build agents like never before. Within the registry we now have 358 agents, 118 connections, 95 protocols and 434 skills.

To put some more numbers against the agent progress — this year we’ve had 235K agents connect. 1.8 million agents found (some more than once) and over 700K search queries. At one point we had 5,777 agents online at once and our OEF peak interaction rate was 15,615 per minute.

Fet Token Swap and Staking

In order to prepare for mainnet version 2, staking version 2 and to accelerate our journey towards true decentralized governance we completed a token swap process. Following this, we launched a brand new staking interface as part of FET staking v2.0 to enable seamless and flexible staking by FET holders. We are super happy to announce that 91,159,904 FET has been staked so far as part of staking v2.0. You can find more details regarding staking and how to get involved here.

To add to all this progress, we developed lightning fast consensus . At Fetch.ai, we worked on the finality problem, and were delighted to announce a cryptographic breakthrough that enabled dramatic improvements to the speed at which transactions are confirmed, while also increasing security. Our published paper explains how this was achieved.

2020 has been a challenging year for everyone but I’m sure we can all come together and hope for a better 2021. Our roadmap highlighting our key aims for next year is coming soon.

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