How news media and the Fetch.ai community misled themselves into thinking that Fetch was a decentralized AI blockchain project when its main agent project is actually centralized, barely related to blockchain, and has no AI capabilities.

Fetch.ai confusion

Fetch (or Fetch.ai) is one of the most misunderstood projects in the crypto sector. Its FET/ASI token is currently #27 in market cap, which is absolutely baffling considering that its main project is completely unrelated to blockchains.

Fetch allows for the creation of agents, which are simple web apps that can be hosted on Fetch's centralized Agentverse servers (or on any private local server).

It recently dropped the "AI" part of its name by renaming their "AI Agents" to just "uAgents". This misleading naming was one of the biggest causes of confusion for why people thought that these agents could do AI.

Separate unrelated projects

The other half of the confusion comes from that fact that nearly all media and the Fetch community have no idea that Fetch is actually multiple projects that either completely unrelated or tangentially related:

1. Agents and Agentverse - Agents are deployable web programs on a centralized server (Agentverse) or on a local self-hosted server unrelated to blockchains. It's very similar to serverless cloud hosting like AWS Lamda or Azure Functions. Unlike smart contracts on most blockchains, whose transactions are executed and validated by large committees of validators, Fetch's agents are only run by a single node or server. So Agentverse is basically a collection of centralized web apps that can communicate with each other through a mailbox delivery system.
2. Fetch Mainnet - a generic Cosmos-SDK-based blockchain. It's like any other Cosmos SDK/Tendermint blockchain and is nothing special. It hosts the Almanac contract used for registering agents on the Agentverse, but that contract could've been built on a generic smart contract blockchain.
3. AI Engine: An AI side project unrelated to blockchains. The bot on the AI Engine DeltaV demo website using has actually been broken for many months, which makes me suspicious about whether the DeltaV project has been abandoned.
4. Fetch and ASI ERC-20 tokens - Used for trading (and maybe for raising funds). This was originally a generic ERC-20 token on Ethereum, that was later turned into a native token on Fetch mainnet.

Because Fetch has multiple projects and often talks about all their projects in a single newsletter, people often assume that their agent project, blockchain project, and AI project are a single project. And thus they wrongly assume Fetch is a decentralized AI blockchain when those parts are actually unrelated.

This is equivalent to assuming that Johnson & Johnson makes AI-touchscreen-shampoo bottles because its 200+ subsidiaries produce shampoo bottles, touchscreen devices, and AI research ... just not together as a single product. Fetch's main project is the Agentverse, and the rest are unrelated projects.

Not AI and not decentralized

The only way the agents can even interact with AI is by calling 3rd-party AI engines using API. But this is no different than how you can create a basic ERC-721 NFT on Ethereum with a TokenURI that points to a Doom web game, and then have the web browser load the game from the URI. Since agents only run on a single off-chain server, they're not as decentralized as on-chain smart contracts.

Coin Bureau's review from Mar 2024 also broke down Fetch's system as separate components. The same is true for Fetch's developer documentation. If you skim through them without applying any critical thinking, it's so easy to mistakenly think that Fetch is a decentralized AI-blockchain project.

If only people applied critical-thinking and read carefully, it would not be hard to realize that the Agentverse, blockchain, and AI are barely-related, separate projects.