About Fetch.ai (FET)

Fetch.ai combines AI and blockchain to establish a network of autonomous economic agents who can perform various data-related tasks for their users, as CryptoNews explained, "reducing the data acquisition monopoly of the large market players."

Put simply, this is an automated data-swapping project.

Fetch.ai aims to replace centralized systems swapping data and intermediating aspects of daily life (for example, booking a hotel).

FET is the native asset.  It’s used for a variety of functions, including as a means of paying the agents who perform the tasks involved with "bringing AI to the crypto economy," as CoinGecko said.

On the Fetch.ai network, per Messari, a series of software agents represent and act on behalf of their owners.

"These autonomous agents work to provide an optimized service across a variety of ecosystems, benefitting both suppliers and consumers," Messari said.

The Fetch.ai framework aims to support billions of IoT devices to facilitate seamless communication in an automated and secure manner, researchers added.

Fetch.ai autonomous agents conduct searches, swap knowledge sets and share predictions, opening the door to a slew of use cases.

Earlier this year, Fetch.ai announced a partnership with Unicred, a DeFi and NFT monetization protocol.

When was FET created and how much was it worth?

This UK-based AI-meets-blockchain startup was launched in early 2017.

Founders include Humayun Sheikh, a founding investor in AI pioneer DeepMind, and Toby Simpson, a developer at DeepMind.

The project carried out a public token sale in March 2019 via Binance Launchpad. It raised $6 million nearly instantaneously. The mainnet went live in 2020. It climbed from less than $0.10 to more than $1. FET’s all-time high of $1.18 was reached in September 2021.

How is the price of FET determined?

Per CoinGecko data, FET has a total supply of 1.2 billion. Of that, about half are currently in circulation. Originally an ERC-20, the digital asset runs the network. Much of the early hype surrounding the future of the project has faded. As the team meets milestones and attracts new partners, exchanges could see a spike in demand among buyers.

Why does FET have value?

FET tokens were designed to serve several functions, including facilitating transactions on the network, similar to "gas" on Ethereum; connecting agents and nodes to the network; and as a means for exchanging value on the network. If the network gains traction, such a scenario (e.g. spiking take-up) would bode well for FET which generally enables the development of and access to a broad range of machine learning and artificial intelligence tasks that are available on the ledger, according to Messari. "These may be primary services, developed by Fetch.ai, such as trust and prediction models, or they may be large-scale independently developed services for network users," Messari said.

Is FET secure?

Fetch.ai has developed a layered architecture with a foremost layer consisting of autonomous economic agents (AEAs) operating in a sensitive realm where traditional forces such as trust and reputation still come into play even as this first layer coexists with a second layer, the Open Economic Framework (OEF), a decentralized transactions system.

The third layer, as CryptoNews explained, is the Fetch smart ledger which handles reputation, trust and intelligence to "ensure the integrity of the system."

What are the main benefits of FET?

• Fetch.ai and its FET token reduce the need for having human or corporate intermediaries control the access to the hub of knowledge created by the digital datasphere, said CryptoNews.
• According to Messari, use cases include optimizing trading for financial services users and reconfiguring public transport networks.
• The Fetch.ai network is an interchain protocol, based on the Cosmos-SDK, CoinGecko explained. It uses a high-performance WASM-based smart contract language (Cosmwasm) to allow advanced cryptography and machine learning logic to be implemented on chain, CoinGecko said.
• Fetch.ai serves as a layer-2 network for Ethereum and as an interchain bridge to the rest of the blockchain world.

What do critics say about FET?

AI is an expensive space to pursue (as Deepmind showed over many years) and Fetch.ai has been slow to hit milestones, said Data Driven Investor.