Fetch.ai Community AMA Recap (9th October 2020)
Fetch.ai Community AMA Recap with;
- Humayun Sheikh — Founder and CEO
- Toby Simpson — Founder and COO
- Jonathan Ward — CTO
- Maria Minaricova — Head of Business Development
Recap compiled by @tremama
TIME: 2pm UTC, Friday 9th October
Q: So first off, a question to each of you -
Tell us about what you do, what are you working on right now, and what do you think is most interesting that our community might want to hear about?
Ans:
Humayun Sheikh — Founder and CEO — @HumayunSheikh : I am the CEO, and the most interesting thing I am excited about for the community is the deployment of real world solutions on the Fetch Ledger. This means we create new spin outs which will use Fetch.ai’s technology and deliver utility for the $FET. This will result in multiple collaborations and partnerships. The technology is now at a stage where we can start deploying use cases and that is very exciting!
Toby Simpson — Founder and COO — @c0obrascobras : That’s easy: watching the population of autonomous economic agents grow, and helping nurture all the projects that are doing that. In particular, the hospitality work, the DDN and some other very cool things we hope to be talking more about real soon now.
Some of you will remember a few weeks ago I spent a Sunday, with wine, writing an OEF explorer to visualise agents in the world and I’ve found that addictive to watch: seeing agents pop up all over the place, and that’s getting grander and grander. Amongst this, our team has released a ton of stuff relating to agent development, such as updates to the Agent Framework, and we teased our visual developer tool that lets anyone develop agents, even if you know nothing about software development. These are exciting times!
In all cases, the agents show real applications, real problems being solved, and drive demand for the FET token as the fuel to make them work. With the upcoming journey to mainnet, we hope to encourage many more of you to BUIDL the odd agent or two — seeing your creation out there, on the oef, talking and negotiating with other agents!
Jonathan Ward — CTO — @Jonathan6620 : We’re working on lots of different things at the moment — I’m really looking forward to showing some applications that provide utility for the token and show all of the capabilities that we’ve built.
Maria Minaricova — Head of Business Development — @maria_mina : I am leading the Business Development activities at Fetch.ai and Mettalex — that means working closely with our partners in the industry, academia as well as speaking with the policy makers and regulators.
I am also chairing the Blockchain for Europe association which is specifically doing such activities with other blockchain industry leaders, giving us a unifying voice.
We have some really interesting developments in the pipe, continuing the work on the supply chain for example — starting new projects to deliver additional functionality. This work we have started with the University of Cambridge, and it has received a lot of good reviews, and brought new contacts and ideas for the future development.
Q: What is your plan for Q4 and What makes you think, FET is ready for adoption? Now some are saying, it’s time for NFT. What are your views?
Ans: Hi, good questions. We’ve got a lot going on in Q4: particularly related to the journey to Mainnet version 2. When completed, that will mean that the entire Fetch technology stack as we originally imagined it will be together and in one piece for the first time ever. We’re deeply looking forward to making progress on that front in the coming months.
NFT is an interesting one, because their application is broader than one might expect. In any scenario where you have unique assets whose ownership needs to be proven and potentially transferred, NFTs can be helpful. In our decentralised delivery network. For example, NFTs can represent assets like seats on trains, planes and busses, or hotel rooms in particular hotels at particular times: it’s all a decentralised way of managing these resources and asserting and proving ownership. (Toby)
Q: Hey guys, did you manage to analyze the effects of FCA’s ban on Fetch’s products? Any conclusions?
Ans: thanks Vlad — yes we have been looking at that closely this week, we have a blog on it we’re working on now- hopefully to post later. Our POV is that Mettalex is not creating crypto derivatives. The derivative products are actually on the commodities themselves, which are less volatile, and fall outside the regulatory perimeter. We had a bit of a heads up that it was coming, and it has caused us to pause for a while before launching but we feel confident we can work around it. (Matt)
Q: @HumayunSheikh in your recent podcast you talked about how the FETCH framework is going to allow Self Driving Cars to see 10 Vehicles ahead! Can you further elaborate on this and if allowed to say, what do some of the future commercial partners think of this! Seems ground breaking 🤯
Ans: You’re not wrong, and it’s all about having “magic eyes”, or as I called it in this blog post, the ultimate cheat mode: being able to see around corners, know what the car in front is going to do, or — more importantly — the many cars in front. (https://medium.com/@toby.simpson/the-courchevel-test-for-self-driving-vehicles-the-impossible-challenge-d45477667c9) (Toby)
Q: There is a lot of concern in the community that the fetch token is being weaned out of utility by you guys introducing other coins like Mettalex and Atomix. Can you please address this — all of us are here I believe because we’re excited by the tech and Fetch’s vision but we also have a vested interest. Maybe help clarify why someone might want to hold the fetch token?
Ans: Absolutely not! One token cannot do everything otherwise why are there so many tokens around. The reason why FET is important is that it is required as the fuel for running anything on the Fetch network, be it agents, random number beacon, or running an autonomous market maker. What we are deploying with spin outs is the ecosystem which actually uses the Fetch network, rather than just waiting for other projects to build on fetch we are showing how new and interesting applications can be built on Fetch network. So all these spin outs add value to the Fetch network and ultimately bring utility to FET. (Humayun)
Q: What use case are you most excited about? — also fetch has so much going on — healthcare — self driving cars — Mettalex — is there one specific area that you are most focused on as a company and why?
Ans: We have several different teams working on these use cases, so each of the teams is really excited about their specific one and proud of their work. They all have high potential and will provide a well diversified portfolio of products for Fetch.ai to build a great future for the company and the community!
Mettalex, mobility and healthcare are getting real traction and I am personally super excited about the real life benefits these projects will bring to all of us. (Maria)
Q: Hi there — thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. Can you please explain the economics behind the fetch random number generator. How much demand does the Binance corporation create for FET and what’s the revenues for the fetch team from the partnership?
Ans: Great question. The random number generator is an oracle that has strong pseudorandomness and cannot be predicted in advance by any party. To attack it (by finding its value in advance) you would need to corrupt more than half of the Fetch validators, which is very difficult and makes it much more secure than a single validator with a VRF. To use the DRB in your application on Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain, users will need to pay a fee in FET for the service. (Jonathan)
Q: I heard some big partnership with Uber and Railway in uk to implement AI
Ans: We are building mobility product suite, you may have seen our recent blog about updates
https://medium.com/fetch-ai/mobility-product-development-update-17e9c84ef426
We do have an application running on fetch that has all train positions in the uk embodied by agents and have been looking at optimisation processes.
Uber we are not working with, but we are working on a “Decentralised Delivery Network” which will be going into field trials in a few months. Think about Uber without the Uber in the middle (Matt)
Q: What use case are you most excited about? — also fetch has so much going on — healthcare — self driving cars — Mettalex — is there one specific area that you are most focused on as a company and why?
Ans: What we are trying to show and prove is the extent of utility the Fetch network can have. It is a universal system which could be deployed for multiple use cases. As you say, a lot is going on so all these projects have to stand for themselves while adding utility to the fetch network. (Humayun)
Q: Any plans for listing MTLX on exchanges?
Ans: We can’t comment on that directly, but we are aware a healthy secondary market in MTLX will help the utility of the Mettalex platform (Matt)
Q: When is the next staking round?
Ans: We are in the final stages of finalising our smart contract upgrade, and we anticipate staking to re-start within the next two weeks (Matt)
Q: There is a lot of concern in the community that the fetch token is being weaned out of utility by you guys introducing other coins like Mettalex and Atomix. Can you please address this — all of us are here I believe because we’re excited by the tech and Fetch’s vision but we also have a vested interest. Maybe help clarify why someone might want to hold the fetch token?
Ans: A couple of points I would also add to what Humayun said is that for the FET ledger to have value it needs to run applications and Mettalex helps us deliver the infrastructure for other projects that could run there. Since the users will often be drawn from different communities and have different interests, goals and objectives it makes sense for them to use different tokens. (Jonathan)
Q: I heard some big partnership with Uber and Railway in uk to implement AI
Ans: There’s nothing to say with regards to Uber, but we’ve posted about and talked about our decentralised delivery network a lot, because it’s an opportunity to ensure that the revenue from delivery remains in the territory it is created rather than taking flight, and also that 20–30% more of it is available to those creating the value.
We believe that these decentralised networks, delivering people, pizzas or packages (as we have said) are key to integrating these different businesses effectively: why should delivery of everything be a separate, enclosed entity? The experts in UX can concentrate on UX, but the underlying mechanism can operate free of centralised control, scale, be robust, flexible and able to adapt to circumstances as they change. It’s also a perfect multi-agent environment for ML/AI to optimise, learn from and provide insights from.
We did, as you may remember, do some exciting stuff with the UK rail network: we also built a very cool agent-per-train system which we showed a while back: real life AEAs representing each train on the UK network live as it happened. With stations too, and also car parks, congestion, signage, and more, you can gradually bring augmented reality together for all aspects of delivery, mobility and supply chain optimisation. (Toby)
Q: When will Mettalex go live?
Ans: We are ready, we just need slight adjustments due to regulatory changes. We will be opening our liquidity pools in 6 weeks time! (Humayun)
Ans: We are dealing with some legal / regulatory challenges at the moment, which we are confident can be complied with (note FCA guidance this week on banning crypto derivatives for retail customers from Jan 2021). Our position is that Mettalex is a commodities derivatives exchange, and while this will require a little work, we are confident we can show this is valuable tool for traders, and outside the ‘regulatory perimeter’ (Matt)
Q: @cobrascobras now that you are busy preparing for commercial deployments what excites you the most ?
Ans: The DDN.
Absolutely the DDN.
It’s so exciting and we’re just weeks away from live field trials and sharing that with you all, too. Each and every day it gets better, faster, smarter. For those of you poking around on the soef, you can see these agents doing their stuff 24/7 and that’s really cool — a perfect example of why these open, public, shared, decentralised networks are awesome… you, me, anyone can choose to take part, build an agent, and be part of the solution.
… and second up, hospitality.
One day, both of those, our trains, and more will all be one massive network of agents serving you. One day, you’ll be able to use it to deliver yourself anywhere on the planet for any reason and everything surrounding that will be solved for you by your own personal group of digital assistants — autonomous economic agents who act on your behalf, knowing your preferences, and solving problems before you even know they exist.
I could go to three, four and five, but you get the idea 🙂 (Toby)
Q: What are the addresses of these services on Ethereum and BSC? It would be interesting to monitor the total spend in FET for those and show it somewhere.
Ans: We’ll be releasing these in the next couple of weeks — we’re waiting until after we’ve completed the token migration before publicising the contracts for obvious reasons. (Jonathan)
Q: What are your main goals for Q4 2020?
Ans: We have several new demos in the pipeline, which we are working on to demonstrate to the community in the next few weeks. These will show the utility of the FET token and the tech advancements we are bringing to this world. (Maria)
Q: Can you clarify what you mean when you talk about making fetch a stable coin?
Ans: This is not something that we have said. @HumayunSheikh did say that we are working on a mechanism to make the cost of SERVICES on the Fetch network to be more stable. Imagine you are a big company that wants to implement an agent based system, and Fetch.ai is a good solution for that.
They of course do not want to deal with crypto price volatility. One month their bill is $10,000, the next month is $100,000 for exactly the same thing. This is not something that a real-world user is going to want to do.
These users will need to be able to predict their prices in advance, so finding a way to enable that is critical to the fabled ‘mass adoption’. There are a few mechanisms to achieve that. The simplest to explain is that the price of an operation on the FET network is denominated in a stable currency, but paid for in FET via some kind of oracle. Another is a “two token” system such as was discussed in our original white paper in 2017. However it is executed it does need to be done, and when you look at the economics of that, what you are worrying about, is not actually a problem (Matt)
Q: I heard some big partnership with Uber and Railway in uk to implement AI?
Ans: Problem with big partnerships and big corporates is that it’s slow! (Humayun)
Q: What are your main goals for Q4 2020?
Ans: The main goals are a series of test-nets that demonstrate the utility of the token in various ways, including agent applications, DRBs and other oracles, Mettalex and governance. We’re really looking forward to getting the community involved in using and extending our technology. (Jonathan)
Q: Is improving FET liquidity on DEXes (like Uniswap) a priority for the team or is that something the community of FET holders should pursue?
Ans: This is a joint effort, the community should support the liquidity efforts on DEXs and we will soon release incentives to support that. (Humayun)
Q: Ethereum network is so congested nowadays so is there any plan to solve it permanently?
Ans: All these networks are for different purposes, and in our case, we want the throughput necessary for autonomous economic agents to get things done on your behalf. Given that there will be a lot of them, and any given solution may require many agents to talk to each other, negotiate and transact, that’s potentially a lot of transactions. When we consider the parameters for our mainnet version 2, we have to take this into account to make sure it works. And with our incentivised testnets and our journey to mainnet v2 (we talked about this in last week’s crowdcast), we’re opening exercising this technology to everyone. (Toby)
Q: Thanks for all the answers. People who were excited to stake FET to receive MTLX lost 50% of what they have put down during the 21 locked staking. I understand the team doesn’t directly control the price of FET — but what do you have to say to backers of the project who are sitting on such losses. This is especially with the background of the team being very excited about so many applications but not providing any numeric guidance of what demand for FET token services are expected to achieve.
Ans: We can’t control the token price @Jungleman2 but we have worked hard on the technology. I think the part that we want to improve is communicating and demonstrating the value of the token in real-world applications. You’ll see a big change over the next couple of months when we’ll be showcasing the many applications that are possible. (Jonathan)
Ans: I do appreciate the support of the FET holders but I am not sure what we can do when the whole crypto market takes a tumble either because the stocks take a dive, a DeFi project packs up or Bitcoin starts dropping. We tried our best to reward our long time FET holders and not short term profit takers. We rewarding them with the first lot of MTLX tokens ie free but we can’t really do much about the price, if anything the community should support the project and spread the word so demand increases. (Humayun)
Q: In terms of use cases and getting adoption, what is the primary focus in 2021?
Ans: The plan is to continue the already started development — to improve the ease of deployment for the developers community and the user experience — ease of use and drive adoption of the projects we have already started working on.
We already have quite a large portfolio of the products and areas we are working on, so those will continue to be the focus in 2021 as well. (Maria)
Q: Will we see an updated roadmap soon?
Ans: Yes we will update the roadmap. We need a better process for this, as I mentioned in our crowdcast last week, different people have different uses for it, and it is causing some friction. I’d appreciate any thoughts or feedback on this as the deadlines will move, as our priorities change, and we internally are ok with that, but it feels others want certainty which we perhaps cannot commit to. Should we change the format of the roadmap to accommodate that for instance? (Matt)
Q: Now that fetch has had a major breakthrough in interoperability. Will we continue to see major projects come to fetch!? To utilize the autonomous agents etc
Ans: Absolutely, and we’re on the case.
And we’re also working to actively encourage, enthuse and incentivise the developer community to get going with agent development, too. And with the new visual agent development system we have in our minds, that opens even more broadly. Pretty much anyone will be able to create agents, deploy them, and earn tokens for their sales. (Toby)
Ans: We certainly hope and anticipate that will happen! Similarly, the Fetch agents and token will also be available on other chains, and demonstrate their value. (Jonathan)
Q: That’s great to hear! Other projects list applications built on top of their network on their website (see for instance https://matic.network/dapps). Do you think it is a priority for Fetch to do something similar? And/or do you have other plans to increase the visibility of the FET utility in 2021?
Ans: Absolutely. This is most certainly the plan. And it will be very clear with the upcoming demos for the community to see the utility of FET and the new partnerships we have been developing to support that. (Maria)
Q: Hi! What was the reasoning for integrating Chainlink for price feeds? From my understanding AMM’s would carry out this function, particularly if you expect it to be a highly liquid market. And isn’t the price request something that could be done via AEA’s? If so, why were they not used.
Ans: Chainlink is giving gold and silver feeds to Mettalex initially, but that will increase over time, as well as there being a good interoperability bridge to the whole fetch network is important as the on chain / off chain link is vital to delivering an ‘economic internet’. Amms could in theory trade around a network of DEXs arbing the prices to determine the actual price without a direct feed, but that’s not the solution Mettalex is implementing now, and also would not currently work well for off chain commodity assets — like gold and silver, and others which is the focus of Mettalex (Matt)
Q: During the process of staking for MTLX, I mistakenly sent my FET to the staking address unknowingly, after the staking has ended, is there any way that the team is working to minimize the risk of investors or stakers? And how is it possible that the same address that stakers used to redeem their tokens can’t be used to retrieve tokens?
Ans: Hi Samuel — unfortunately, this is an issue with the way that Ethereum deals with contract addresses. (Jonathan)
Q: How many employees and staff working in Fetch AI?
Ans: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fetch-ai
47 (Matt)
Q: 3rd try…..Hi! What was the reasoning for integrating Chainlink for price feeds? From my understanding AMM’s would carry out this function, particularly if you expect it to be a highly liquid market. And isn’t the price request something that could be done via AEA’s? If so, why were they not used.
Ans: There are prices for many many things. Agent based oracle network which Fetch is working on is a dynamic and self balancing oracle system for IoT devices (or other devices for that matter). ChainLink prices are for more exchange prices which we can use for Mettalex (Humayun)
Ans: Chainlink is an established technology for providing oracle services — there’s no reason not to use AEAs for that application, and is something that we’re looking into. (Jonathan)
Q: During the process of staking for MTLX, I mistakenly sent my FET to the staking address unknowingly, after the staking has ended, is there any way that the team is working to minimize the risk of investors or stakers? And how is it possible that the same address that stakers used to redeem their tokens can’t be used to retrieve tokens?
Ans: We try our best to inform everyone about the procedure. The curse of decentralised ledgers is that we can’t do much about it. We are trying to make sure things are even clearer next time. (Humayun)
Q: Will fetch agents on other chains still use fet to operate?
Ans: Yes.
Because ultimately, the entire search and discovery service requires it. The digital world isn’t a ton of parallel universes, it’s one, and your agents can be seen by and can see other agents and computationally expensive search operations, such as semantic searches and world exploration, require FET tokens. There are also FET tokens integrated for registering on this service as “mini-stakes”, so FET is a key part of making agents work, regardless of what other chains and technologies they may integrate with.
Of course, the Fetch network is the perfect home for agents, because it is being designed to be that way, but we recognise that sometimes agents need to interface with and co-operate with other technologies. (Toby)
Q: How can people help the network with building AEA on their nodes?
And is there any prize for that?
Ans: Next week, we may have news for you 🙂
So building AEAs is something that many more people are doing now, and we’re excited to support that in our developer slack, and elsewhere, such as through the incentivisation plans as part of our journey to mainnet v2. (Toby)
Q: How do you envision the fetch token being used with autonomous vehicles?
Ans: This is a great example of autonomous driving model
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18hX6M1vdjY
FET will be enabled within the microtransactions between the car and the smart infrastructure — imagine a high velocity Pay as you go search engine, which is presenting the car with the info it needs, when it needs it, and payment for value and data is done via the Fetch.ai network. All that is done with FET (Matt)
Q: Will fetch agents on other chains still use fet to operate?
Ans: yes they will. That means also deploying the FET token and having interoperability on the networks where the agents are used. There are some inter-chain governance issues around doing that so we won’t deploy them everywhere, but they’ll certainly run on Ethereum and BSC. I’d expect that there will be quite a lot of competition from projects wanting to use the agents as they’re a unique and game-changing technology. (Jonathan)
Q: How do you envision the fetch token being used with autonomous vehicles?
Ans: In a very similar way to what we have already demonstrated with the EV charging Smart E-Mobility Challenge 2019 — Electric Vehicle Charging Use Case — https://youtu.be/XuXcQPSzk5E
and our latest Signs’ demo https://youtu.be/18hX6M1vdjY
The agents representing the autonomous vehicles will be able to communicate with other agents in the mobility & smart cities ecosystem, receiving supplemental information about the ecosystem and using this to provide a better, safer and personalized user experience. (Maria)
First off thanks very much to everyone for participating, and in particular thanks to @HumayunSheikh @maria_mina @cobrascobras @Jonathan6620 for the efforts responding to the questions.
Also thanks as always to our amazing community team @tremama, @Pasaift and the community mods, ambassadors and creator club.
