Fetch.ai x BinanceNigeria Community AMA Recap (25th November 2020)
Before we get down to the order of the day, can each speaker briefly introduce yourself to the community.
A: I am the CEO, and co founder of Fetch.ai with background in technology, ML/AI and commodities trading. The most interesting thing I am excited about for the community is the deployment of real world solutions on the Fetch framework. 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! (Humayun)
A: 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. At Fetch.ai We have some really interesting developments in the pipe, continuing the work on the Parking optimization and Smart infrastructure project with our partner Datarella in Germany. Also continue the development in the supply chain 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 (Maria)
A: Hi everyone — my name is Jonathan Ward, CTO at Fetch.ai. I was originally head of the research team, and led the design of the protocols and technology that we’re currently building. Before that I had a background in industry and academia in machine learning and research into complex systems. (Jon)
A: I’m Toby, co-founder and COO at Fetch.ai. Before I started work with Fetch.ai and the decentralised crypto space, I worked on developing computer games (back as far as the Amiga!). Also produced the successful artificial life Creatures game series, worked on building my own large-scale MMOG universe and spent some time as Head of Software Design at Deepmind. All of these things are surprisingly connected! We need scale to deliver today’s modern digital economy which is getting more and more complex
And what’s exciting about now is that all this stuff is working: it’s live, you can build and deploy agents, and people are right this moment with our incentivised testnets. It’s super exciting to see them appear all over the world! No agents yet in Nigeria though! (Toby)
Q: hopefully soon though
A: Absolutely: and we’d be absolutely delighted to support anybody who wants to do this. We have great tools, great documentation, and the incentivised testnets guide the development of agents from start to deployment. (Toby)
Q: First off, what is Fetch.ai currently working on and what further developments/announcements can we expect to hear this year?
A: Where to start. We’ve recently announced some great new partnerships with hegic, cudo and datarella with who we are launching our smart cities field trials project. Alongside this, we have exciting developments regarding collective learning and our Decentralised Delivery Network that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks.
Also, the agent world stage of our incentivized testnet has just entered its third phase and we are encouraging everyone in the community to get involved. No previous developer experience is needed, build or modify agents, learn new skills and earn FET for doing so — https://docs.fetch.ai/i_nets/quickstart-aw3/
With Mettalex, we are really excited to have recently launched our early access program to help us get ready for the full launch. Apply to be part of that here: buff.ly/3537jjp (Maria)
A: We’re doing a lot of work right now with large-scale mobility type networks, such as our DDN (Decentralized Delivery Network). We’re launching it in Cambridge very soon.
The DDN uses autonomous agents to deliver tailored delivery experiences: delivering yourself, your packages or your food. It’s a truly open system that takes advantage of all the key Fetch advantages: our network’s staking capabilities for dispute resolution and agreement on truth, our fast ledger and powerful smart-contract system, our autonomous economic agents and our collective and individual AI.
We’re doing some real-world trials in the coming days and weeks and we’re super excited to show how this can return the power and control to the individuals (and do so safely), reduce the influence of aggregators and provide a common interface through which anyone can take part.
But it’s important to note that the DDN doesn’t operate in isolation: it’s not just transportation of people and goods, it’s more than that. Imagine this: asking your agent to deliver you to San Francisco for a conference. It’d have to deal with multiple transportation modes, hotels, restaraunts and more. We’ve already got agents related to hotels on the network, and they live in harmony with the vehicles delivering and the people being delivered. It’s the start of something grand.
For more on the DDN, I wrote this: https://medium.com/@toby.simpson/people-pizzas-and-packages-a-delivery-network-for-the-21st-century-50e6218e748f (Toby)
A: On the technical side, continuing work on our ledger implementation so that it provides great support for agents, our decentralized machine learning system is shaping up and will be ready for prime-time soon.
https://medium.com/fetch-ai/unleashing-data-with-collective-machine-learning-c5e21bfb2ed9 (Jon)
The test-nets have also been a great success — it’s a great opportunity to learn how to build next-generation autonomous agents — something that’s going to be in huge demand in the very near future! (Jon)
Q: With the recent announcement on field trials in Munich for Smart City infrastructure, is Fetch.ai planning on launching on more such field trials?
A: Yup — the DDN, for a start.
In the coming days we’ll actually be running it for real, with real apps on real devices, in real vehicles with real people being delivered. It’s super exciting to reach this stage: there’s a huge difference between seeing these things being simulated and seeing agents out in the wild solving people’s problems. It’s a gradual process, but one we’re greatly looking forward to.
From a hospitality side, we’re not far from seeing agents book hotel rooms, either, and it’s possible for all agent developers to connect to our search-and-discovery system (the soef) and watch these agents move, work and get things done. Indeed, it’s also possible to interact with our agents! And we’ve got documentation coming to help you along with that, too.
Field trials are vital: we show this stuff working in the real world, we refine the technology, and then make it available for everyone to work with. It’s a decentralised network, and it’s open to build with.
(and we’re doing this stuff globally, too: trials in Cambridge, but also increasingly exercising the technology elsewhere, too, as we are in Munich) (Toby)
A: ‘Agents’ are the new active and autonomous ‘Websites’ and Fetch is the new Google for Agents! (Humayun)
A: We are creating the new Economic Internet — for everyone to use, where agents representing people, data, organizations, machines can transact together and exchange value and data! (Maria)
Q: I reckon with this users will able to plan ahead as well as make Informed decisions before actually embarking on it right
A: The agents are autonomous so should be able to do most of your planning for you! (Jon)
A: Setting up the infrastructure for the machine-to-machine economy and enabling Economy of Things! (Maria)
A: The technology itself is there to take the worry away: your agents will solve your problems on your behalf and present you with solutions as opposed to tons of options and other problems. It’s an area where AI and learning can help greatly, too (Toby)
A: The general idea is that they go out into the world and fulfill goals on our behalf so that your energy bill is optimized, or your flights booked, or your accounts looked after (Jon)
Q: I guess the agent information will be provided super fast?
A: Indeed it will: potentially thousands of agents will have talked to each other to solve your problems, and they can adapt in real time to rapidly changing circumstances. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that circumstances change fast… (Toby)
A: Because they can process much more information they’re capable of making better choices. They also don’t sleep or get tired (Jon)
A: … and the disadvantage of large-scale centralised solutions is they steer like the titanic. You can’t adjust them fast, whereas a large population of autonomous agents can adapt instantly, with no prior knowledge of the changes taking place, and do so robustly without the whole solution catching fire (Toby)
Q: What applications can we expect for Fetch ai in the DeFi space?
A: The applications can be many but more specifically a few examples are: Autonomous Market Makers based on our agents, a very good example of this is the Hegic agent: https://medium.com/fetch-ai/hegic-launches-autonomous-hegician-options-trading-tool-built-on-fetch-ai-5d943dd7576e
And the other exciting application will be for the Agent Based Oracle network which we are currently working on (Humayun)
A: We have Metallex (a decentralized commodities platform) and Atomix (a collatoralized lending platform).
Our whole technology stack is also well-suited to DeFI — we’re implementing a minimal agency consensus scheme: https://fetch.ai/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/fetch_consensus_v0.20.pdf
That is ideal for dexes as it means your transactions can’t be front-run.
The agent framework is also ideal for building decentralized oracle networks for existing and next-generation DeFi applications (Jon)
A: And also, when it comes to the Agent-based Oracle network, establishing the truth reliably to get things done is vital in applications across the board. It’s key for DeFi, but it’s also essential in the DDN, logistics, energy, hospitality and more: there are disputes, a need to establish where and what something is, etc., and these reliable trustworthy links between the crypto and the real world are essential (Toby)
Q: When will Mettalex launch and be listed to other exchanges?
A: The Early Access Program has recently launched. We will be selecting a few waves of users to join. Initially we were focused on professional / experienced traders in the crypto/commodities space, but now we encourage anyone interested to register. The first wave was small — 5–10 people — but we have now rolled out to over 50 people and will be rolling out even more over the rest of November and December. This process is allowing you to pioneer the platform and provide us with the crucial feedback to get it as ready as possible ahead of the full launch.
Listing possibly one day (Humayun)
A: For the Mettalex Early Access program — please go to our website and apply now
https://mettalex.com/eap/ and apply using this form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjt3Ak7zJpswWmb4Tq3e1gcZIZkfBrDPVjN4u5BkuhTIlCqg/viewform (Maria)
Q: What is happening with the incentivized testnet programme? How do I get involved?
A: We have a program of test-nets to try out different aspects of our technology stack in preparation for the launch of our v2.0 main-net in 2021.
It’s been a great success, so far, on a technical and community level. All of the technology has performed flawlessly and our community has learned a lot and engaged really well with the challenges. We’re looking forward to testing out lots of new and exciting technology that’s now ready for real-world deployment including our agent-based oracle networks and artificial intelligence networks.
You can take part by joining our Discord channel, where we’ll be giving continuous updates on the challenges that are taking place and you can get technical help https://discord.gg/KsyuNAmD8r (Jon)
A: The incentivised testnet has been in full swing for a few weeks now and it’s very successful. We’re on the agent phase at the moment, and we’ve just moved on to the third part, AW3, as of yesterday. Check out the leaderboard so far: https://leaderboard-ranking.fetch.ai and to find out more, go here: https://docs.fetch.ai/i_nets/ (Toby)
A: If you’re new to Discord, you can also get announcements on our TG: https://t.me/fetch_ai (Jon)
A: AW3 is particular exciting because it’s about modifying existing agents rather than creating new ones, and as we know, that’s always easier. AW-3 makes available all the agents from AW-2 for all to work with via the agent registry. The program is a great way for anyone to get involved with Fetch.ai, innovate some new tech and even be rewarded for doing so. For details of AW-3: https://docs.fetch.ai/i_nets/quickstart-aw3/ (Toby)
A: The next phase (starting 7th of December) will be on governance so no technical skills are required. For industry adoption this is a very important topic, so looking forward to engaging the community in that aspect as well (Jon)
Q: Large Amounts of reliable Data are needed to build and develop Machine learning Models and AI systems how does Fetch AI source for the data need to train it’s Machine learning Models for effective performance and how reliable are the sources
A: Great question — there are a few different solutions to this — one is reputation, the others are financial incentives and governance. Our approach is to build a lego set that can be combined in different ways to solve any problem (Jon)
A: we are building the fabric which connects the learners to learn from eachother without the restrictions of data or the model. This is a building block of ML and AI (Humayun)
Q: Why did you decide to choose the ETHEREUM ERC-20 network? What benefits can a network with gas congestion bring you?
A: We have our our own network with much lower fees and congestion launching in 2021. We’re also building interoperability with the major networks such as Eth2.0, Cosmos, Polkadot and Binance smart chain that will allow us to provide AI and agent0-based services wherever they’re needed.(Jon)
Q: How is the FET token used? How to keep motivated to hold FET tokens for a long term?
A: FET is a utility token. It is the fuel for agents to get things done on the network. FET is needed for search and discovery, for transactions, for smart contracts, for access to staking-based oracle services (“truth” between the decentralised world and the real world and resolution of disputes, etc.) and AI/ML activity.
When mainnet V2 is launched in Q1 2021, all of this will be fully integrated into the new mainnet: and the growing population of agents (it grows every day) will be using FET to solve your problems, to make your life better, and to optimise a digital economy that’s so overcomplex now that it’s in danger of grinding to a halt. (Toby)
Q: Currently there are many environmental protection campaigns of many blockchain projects, whether FETCH .AI has an intention or environmental protection plan?
A: This is very important to me personally — we do a lot of work on decentralized energy networks to reduce pollution and we’re very focussed on reducing waste in many different areas. (Jon)
Q: Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
A: we don’t have a token burn but we have a buyback plan which enables Fetch to do the same via the fees from fetch and the spinout projects (Humayun)
Q: What makes a token succesful is being actually useful, so users have real reasons to buy it, what are the use cases of your token in the ecosystem, and which ones will be released soon?
A: This is something that will really take off over the next six months — we have lots of uses for the token to provide security to the network, and to monetise agent-based services and collective learning (Jon)
Q: About crypto education, most people don’t know nothing about Nft. Do you have any projects to learn how can the people how to buy and sell a NFT? Like videos tutorials in youtube etc…
A: Actually, when it comes to cypto education, most people don’t know anything about anything. It’s surprisingly hard to understand the why, and to separate all these concepts and understand what they mean. It’s also a scary place: many people don’t want to be their own bank, they’re scared of the responsibility, and the impact of making a bad decision. As a community, all of us needs to work harder to introduce these concepts safely, and to talk about what blockchain means when it comes to scale, decentralisation, disintermediating the economy, enabling “economic Lego” and more.
And when it comes to NFTs: any asset where it is important to establish ownership and be able to transfer that ownership can be done cryptographically using NFTs. For our DDN, this might mean a seat on a plane, or a room in a hotel. It’s super exciting: forgery is impossible, ownership is guaranteed to be with one person, and transfers leave a trail on the blockchain. The applications in gaming, mobility, carbon credits, etc., are simply endless. It’s a great time to be involved! (Toby)
Q: What is the vision and mission of Fetch AI ? What problems are you trying to solve? Do these problems remain unsolved with the existing public blockchains?
A: We’re building a lego set that allows users to build any kind of autonomous digital economy. This uses bottom-up agent-based principles so that it scales well and doesn’t have to be controlled by any single company or government. (Jon)
Q: What are the future plans for Fetch AI Project ? Do you have any exciting things down the pipeline that you can share?
A: We’ve had a good year as we reach the stage where we’re deploying real applications with real partners, and this is a process that is just beginning. We’re at the very start of pushing Fetch technology, its autonomous agents, it’s underlying ledger, and the grand applications that are possible out into the real world so that everyone can see, touch and use them. And for developers: now’s the time to BUIDL: the agent framework is excellent, the tools super cool, and you can interact with your own, others’ agents and our agents to gather insights, intelligence and more! (https://docs.fetch.ai/aea for more!) (Toby)
Q: Are you a global project or local project? Can anybody anywhere use Your project without any restrictions?
A: Hey Leuella, that’s a very good question. And the answer is very simple — we are building an open source software and infrastructure that can be used by anyone. Learn how to build the agents and use them to represent you or your data or assets. You can create marketplaces on top of the Fetch infrastructure (Maria)
Q: How many layers is the Fetch AI composed of? What is the main function of each of these layers?
A: Fetch has three/Four layers: The settlement layer, the connectivity layer, the agent framework layer and an optional Collective learning layer (Humayun)
Q: Can you talk about Launching your Random Number Beacon? What is this innovative product, how does it work and what tasks does it solve?
A: The random beacon makes our consensus faster, cheaper and more secure:
It is also a really useful “random oracle” for many different use-cases including gaming, lotteries, DeFI and the supply-chain use-cases that we’re working on (Jon)
Q: Will there be any eth 2.0 impact on fetch?
A: Super excited to see eth 2.0. This is not a space that’s “one size fits all”. There are different technologies, solving different problems for different scenarios. For us, our ledger requires certain capabilities to support millions of agents getting things done. It needs tight integration with the search-and-discovery world (our soef) and the agent framework. Indeed, there are three decentralised neworks operating in harmony to make Fetch happen: the ledger, the soef, and the agent framework’s p2p network that lets agents negotiate and transact. (Toby)
Q: Finding investors is hard, keeping investors is harder, so what strategy does FETCH have enough to make investors trust and with FETCH project go a long way?
A: We can set out our road map and deliver on it with products which are useful and attract customers. This creates value for the investors and token holders. Fetch is a project with real usecases and a wide application surface (Humayun)
Q: What role does the community play within the Fetch ecosystem? How is the feedback you receive from your community? How important is the Fetch community to you?
A: The community is very important to us. That is why we are here, talking to you guys, engaging and answering your questions.
We have our Fetch TG and Discord channels where we invite you to join us and to continue this interesting conversation. https://t.me/fetch_ai (Maria)
Q: What is your strategy for building a strong community? And how important is the role of the community to your project?
A: All of the value in any blockchain network comes from its community, so we take it very seriously. The great thing about having the technology out in the real world is that we can start getting the community involved in how the network develops over time. Our governance program, starting in early December is a great opportunity to move this forward.
Q: How does Fetch AI compete with projects that boast a high number of transactions per second (TPS) and a directed acyclic graph(DAG) data structure ?
A: we don’t compete with them we partner with them, fetch agent framework is built for interoperability (Humayun)
Q: How do you overcome the Threat of CENTRALIZATION?
A: Good use of capital letters there 🙂
Centralisation has disadvantages. As an approach and in its results. Solutions tend to be siloed, they cannot be combined with others to create new businesses, they are harder to adapt fast and they can sometimes scale poorly and be relatively brittle.
Decentralisation, on the other hand, tends to be a more bottom-up philosophy: putting in place a large population of smaller, simpler things (agents) that can combine to solve complex problems without human intervention. They can be recombined in different ways, they need no prior knowledge of each other to do this, the scale well and they are robust.
In the end, it’s a combination of the two that is the sweet spot right now and massive existing centralised resources don’t vanish overnight, nor should they, as the economy relies on them. It’s the combination of these approaches that we’re excited with in the short-term: solving problems by connecting them in new ways and making better use of the assets that we have. (Toby)
Q: I love IOT and have been involved in building interactive objects using open source hardwares and softwares… For individual IOT users like me How will the fetch AI Ecosystem be of benefit especially in terms of securely storing private data generated from This IOT devices?
A: This is fantastic! You should definitely join our Testnet program — to learn to build agents and connect them to your IoT devices. And make them autonomous and intelligent.
https://docs.fetch.ai/i_nets/quickstart-aw1/
And our developers slack channel https://discord.gg/UDzpBFa (Maria)
Q: It’s heard that the next phase of adoption of blockchain technology will come from Gaming, DeFi and NFT. What is your views on this and what will be your prime focus for mass adoption Fetch AI?
A: The technology is designed for DeFI and is also very well-suited to gaming applications and NFTs. The great thing about our project is that we’re unique so can offer something new to many different use-cases. (Jon)
Q: Does FET have plans to implement privacy in Fetch? Does IoT currently require a lot of hardware privacy and does applying AI — Agents to control the device cause the device to be deactivated?
A: Privacy and security are vital.
And at all layers, too. We live in a GDPR world in Europe where data privacy and protection are key things and this is the right thing to do, and networks need to be designed to work with such regulation. Likewise, there is a requirement for certain activity and data to be protected: confidential medical data, for example. Agents must, therefore, be able to compute, exchange and otherwise work with data without disclosing what should not be disclosed. We have answers to all of this: from collective learning (more on this soon, but there are some great resources on the web site) and also stuff we already have in the agent framework. (toby)
Q: Why did you choose to build the FET token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not on a scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum has many scalability issues?
A: You are absolutely right — we are building our own scalable blockchain that can support IoT applications.
We are also launching a DeFi project — check it out https://mettalex.com/ (Maria)
Q: How will Fetch.AI solve the problem in cross shard transaction packing? Is there a scenario of multiple conflicting blocks?
A: That’s a great question and we have a sharding scheme that combines smart agent-based wallets and incentives to optimise throughput in sharded blockchains. These are quite technical resources but can have a huge impact: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00319 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXODiRx7qM&list=PL2RguVq4YcL1JplxSz6S3xZLqtTqB2GKt&index=2 (Jon)
Q: Do you have a strategy to reach big offline commerce industries? Considering that even with the exponential growth of e-commerce most of the transactions worldwide involve those industries. Are you already partnering with one?
A: We can’t comment on individual partnerships but we have had a lot of interest from the corporate sector (Jon)
Q: I recently read that Fetch.ai is working on a loan platform that would grant loans against physical assets, what are the requirements that users must meet to use this loan and what is the interest percentage?
A: Yes, exactly — https://atomix.ai/ You can register your interest and sign up for the newsletter. (Maria)
Q: how will Fetch AI team target and educate people who don’t know about blockchain and crypto?
A: Douglas Adams said something along the lines of “People don’t want technology, they want to get thigns done”. Good technology is invisible. It is there, solving your problems, making your life easier, and it is not in your way. With crypto and blockchain, that’s a process that the community as a whole gets better at every day as it evolves and matures. (Toby)
Q: Marketing is the core element of every project, so everyone knows that the potential that the project can bring is essential to achieving the set goals. How do you attract new users and investors to acquire and maintain long-term development?
A: By showcasing real world use case and projects that benefit the users and the world — for example like this one in Munich , Germany
https://www.fastcompany.com/90575914/this-ai-powered-parking-garage-rewards-you-for-not-driving (Maria)
Q: What do you guys think about the privacy concerns with AI?
A: There’s a lot to unpack in that question, as like all these things, it rather depends on the context and application. AI is a broad subject, and it’s not clear where it impacts on privacy. For most people, AI/ML impacts on them because they have a device in their homes that listens to what they are doing and tries to help out. I’d fear that a lot more than anything that autonmous economic agents could do, for example, as the latter tend to be working together with small pieces of knowledge to deliver bigger answers (Toby)
Q: What are the difficulties and chances that Fetch AI face right now while crypto/blockchain market is still young and need time to grow?
A: Some of the challenges are with educating people about the benefits of blockchain. This is a universal challenge that all of us are facing — and we do this through workshops for the community, discussions with the regulators and legislators as Fetch.ai and also as part of the Blockchain for Europe association (Maria).
Q: It is known that Vitalik Buterin stated that there were risks associated with the Defis, do you agree with that opinion? How do you guys work to make Fetch AI secure DeFi?
A: DeFI is very new and quite a risky area — everyone in the space is learning all the time and the pace of innovation is very fast. We have lots of highly skilled PhD educated people who care a lot about getting it right and we invest a lot in audits, so I think we’re doing almost everything we can to make DeFi as secure as it can be (Jon)
Q: How can I request for Fetch artificial intelligence service ?
A: We’ll be launching the UI and providing demos on this technology in early 2021 (Jon)
Q: Can you elaborate further on staking, who will be able to stake, how will staking be administered, and how soon will it go live?
A: This is already available now — please go to https://fetch.ai/staking/ (Maria)
Q: What is the role of the community in the governance of the Fetch ecosystem?
A: Lots coming up on this: it’s vital. For anything to be truly decentralised, the community must be the “owner” of the decisions, even if those are related to deciding who makes the decisions. We’ve got a special section on this in our incentivised testnets in early December as we run up validators and governance decisions. Please do get involved! (Toby)
Q: Why did you choose to build the FET token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not on a scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum has many scalability issues?
A: we are building interoperability with Ethereum and other chains so we will have tokens on multiple chains (Humayun)
Q: What makes a token successful is being actually useful, so users have real reasons to buy it, what are the use cases of your token in the ecosystem, and which ones will be released soon?
A: The token is useful when it is being used. See one of our current implementation projects
https://www.fastcompany.com/90575914/this-ai-powered-parking-garage-rewards-you-for-not-driving (Maria)
Q: You talked about your project not having any agent in Nigeria, what about other countries in Africa? Is there any procedures in place for Africa countries to benefit concerning the project?
A: We’ve been very focussed on building the core technology but now that it’s ready to be used in the real-world, we’re going to be working more on building communities in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. (Jon)
