Humayun Sheikh is the CEO & co-Founder of Fetch.ai. Fetch.ai is an 18 months old company that develops solutions around multi agent systems that utilises the principles of the technology behind blockchain. In this podcast we discuss Fetch.ai and how autonomous economic agents can transact and settle transactions autonomously in an economic manner to facilitate the exchange of insights and inferences without the sharing of data sets.

***Image taken on the 27th of February prior to social distancing***

 

What is blockchain?

For Humayun, blockchain is just a record keeping mechanism that has the unique feature that enables people to interact with it in a decentralised manner without the need for a centralised entity to control it.

Its other interesting feature is that you can exchange economic value on it which makes it a key differentiator from a centralised database.

 

Challenges of today’s suboptimal digital world

In today’s digital world we use a lot of technology. Unfortunately, it is done in different pockets of different things. The challenge is that as we try to connect them all we are faced with issues of interoperability.

For example, how does an individual’s train timetable get connected to their personal assistance? How does their calendar become aware of the train timetables and its possible delays? These examples illustrate some of the very inefficient interconnectivity that people have to deal with in their lives.

Attempts to connect all these services require an exchange of economic value to enable the settlement of these services. Because of these reasons, Humayun believes we are living in a suboptimal world because you can’t build a centralised system from top down which can account for all of these problems. These challenges has led to an increasing move towards software defined systems and autonomous systems.

Whilst APIs are an attempt at trying to facilitate interconnectivity between disparate systems they still require software to be written to connect them up. Additional code is also required to extract the data and process it in a meaningful manner. Because of these reasons Humayun doesn’t believe we are solving the problem because organisations are still building solutions to connect different things together.

The other side of the problem is how do you discover those APIs? How can an organisation rapidly identify an API and connect with it without writing any code in a near real time basis?

 

What is Fetch.ai and its mission?

Humayun describes Fetch as a connectivity and intelligent connectivity solution. He defines connectivity as having three components:

* How do you find something to connect?

* How do you actually connect? (the technical aspect of making a connection)

* Once you have connected, how do you connect economically?

These three components are effectively the different components of Fetch. Fetch is a layered solution that provides a substrate where the economic value exchange, the search and discovery and where the actual physical connectivity can take place.

These three components are delivered via Fetch’s:

* Distributed ledger

* Open economy framework

* Autonomous economic agents

 

Fetch’s distributed ledger technology & smart contract

With a multitude of existing distributed ledger technology (DLTs) which exist, Humayun explained why Fetch built their own ledger.