Bosch has partnered with Cambridge-based AI blockchain startup Fetch.ai with the aim of transforming existing digital ecosystems using distributed ledger technologies (DLTs).
The global engineering giant will test key features of Fetch.ai’s testnet until the end of this month and will deploy a node on the network. The strategic engineering project between Fetch.ai and Bosch is called the Economy of Things (EoT).
Dr Alexander Poddey, the leading researcher for digital socio-economy, cryptology, and artificial intelligence in the EoT project, said:
“Our collaboration with Fetch.ai spans from the aspects of governance and orchestration of DLT-based ecosystems, multi-agent technologies to collective learning.
They share our belief that these elements are crucial to realising the economic, social, and environmental benefits of IoT technologies.”
Fetch.ai’s testnet launched in October 2020 and the firm is now gearing up for its mainnet launch in March. The company has been ramping up announcements in advance of the mainnet launch and just last week announced a partnership with FESTO to launch a decentralised marketplace for manufacturing.
After the mainnet launch, Bosch intends to run nodes and applications on Fetch.ai’s blockchain network.
Jonathan Ward, CTO of Fetch.ai, commented:
“We have been working with Bosch for some time towards our shared vision of building open, fair, and transparent digital ecosystems. I’m delighted to be able to announce the first public step in bringing these technologies into the real world.
We’re looking forward to working further with Bosch to bring about the wide adoption of these ground-breaking innovations, which will hugely benefit consumers and businesses in many industries including automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare.”
Fetch.ai is working on decentralised autonomous “agents” which perform real-world tasks.
Bosch is attracted to Fetch.ai’s vision of collective learning technologies and believes it can be a key enabler in their plans for AI-enabled devices—allowing AI agents to be trained which operate within smart devices while preserving users’ privacy and control of their data.
Fetch.ai’s vision is bold but it has the team and partnerships to pull it off. The company’s roster features talent with experience from DeepMind, Siemens, Sony, and a number of esteemed academic institutions.
Bosch has long expressed a keen interest in distributed ledger technologies and established multiple industry partnerships.
The venture capital arm of Bosch, Robert Bosch Venture-Capital, invested in the IOTA Foundation. Bosch later patented an IOTA-based digital payments system and recently financially supported a hackathon for the DLT platform which uses a scalable DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) data structure called the ‘Tangle’ in a bid to overcome some of the historic problems with early blockchains.
Fetch.ai and IOTA are in the same space but have different goals, it’s not a choice of one or the other. Companies like Bosch can take advantage of the exciting potential offered by both DLTs to gain a competitive edge.
(Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash)
