Fetch.ai has caught the attention of investors for its potentially groundbreaking machine learning network of autonomous “agents” that can perform real-world tasks. It’s also caught our attention, making our list of innovative companies to watch in 2021.

IOTA was among the most hyped projects during the 2017 cryptocurrency/blockchain frenzy (or bubble, dependent on your perspective.) While most projects have since collapsed, IOTA continues to go from strength-to-strength and has announced a series of partnerships with giants like Dell and Jaguar Land Rover.

One partnership that both companies have in common is Bosch.

IOTA was the first to establish a partnership with Bosch when it announced that it was integrating with IOTA’s Data Marketplace. Last February, Fetch.ai announced its own partnership with Bosch as part of a joint project called the Economy of Things (EoT).

No specific project involving Fetch.ai, IOTA, and Bosch has been announced but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the first real-world adoption coming from the three companies.

While we can speculate on the exciting future possibilities, what’s actually been announced today is an agreement between Fetch.ai and IOTA to deliver a controlled data sharing environment for IoT devices and infrastructures. The ultimate goal is to enable the automated fee-less retrieval and private sharing of data.

Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai, said:

“The fundamental goal of this collaboration is to enable granular control over data and to reduce the reliance on centralised systems that take advantage of data.

While there are numerous partnerships focusing on data privacy, this one adds the layer of economic benefit for stakeholders via autonomous economic agents without compromising data privacy.

Enabling these agents to perform “useful economic work” on behalf of individuals, businesses, companies, and other entities or organizations will speed up the adoption of Fetch.ai autonomous economic agents and IOTA Streams thereby allowing them to communicate with sophistication across industries like mobility, supply chain, IoT and more.”

Holger Koether, Director of Partner Management at IOTA Foundation, added:

“The main feature of this partnership is offering a serious AI application for the devices that make up the machine economy on the IOTA and Fetch networks.

We are enabling data producers to take control over who can access the data they produce whether from a mobile device, environment IoT sensor, connected vehicle, Industrial IoT solution, and a host of IoT-focused use cases.

With this partnership, we hope both the Fetch and IOTA communities expand the functionally of what devices can do autonomously on distributed networks.”

IOTA has faced various criticisms over the years but the project now seems to have overcome most of its problems. The one major lingering criticism is of centralisation due to its ‘Coordinator’ node. However, that is set for removal in IOTA 2.0.

The IOTA 2.0 ‘Nectar’ devnet went live last week. For the first time, assets on the network will be persistent even after upgrades.

“IOTA 2.0 DevNet ‘Nectar’ marks a major milestone on IOTA’s trajectory towards full decentralisation,” commented Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. “I cannot understate the importance of this release: Nectar is the living proof that you can have feeless, scalable, secure, resource-efficient, and fully decentralised DLT. It’s a game-changer.”

With IOTA 2.0 heading towards its first release candidate later this year, we can expect many more announcements in the months to come.

Want to learn more from executives at the heart of this space? The Blockchain IoT Solutions Congress on March 8 2022 will explore the convergence of these two technologies and the use cases and industries that will benefit.

The post Fetch.ai announces partnership with IoT-focused distributed ledger IOTA appeared first on AI News.

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)

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located 5G Expo, IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

The post Bosch partners with Fetch.ai to ‘transform’ digital ecosystems using DLTs appeared first on AI News.