Fabric’s Vision of an Open Network Where Anyone Can Deploy and Earn From Robots

The vast majority of discussions on robotics still center on the question of who develops the best hardware. However, there is another question that is slowly gaining increasing significance and that is who owns the network that those robots are working over? At this point, the solution is nearly always one company. The fleet, the software stack, the data and the economics belong to them. Work with their robots you do as you please. Fabric Foundation is hoping that model no longer works as robotics scales. What @FabricFND is creating is no other robotics company. It is an open network - infrastructure that allows anyone to contribute to deploying, organizing and benefiting off robots in actual real-world settings. Imagine it is not so much a hardware maker but a marketplace layer, which lies below the industry as a whole. One of the participants might provide compute to orchestrate the work of robots, assist in installing equipment in a new region, or just buy into the network and get a share of its expansion. The thing is that the advantage does not remain in the balance sheet of a single corporation. This is more important than it appears to be initially. The robotics business is on course toward the era when useful machines can actually be affordable and accessible. What that brings about is not simply more robots - it brings about a coordination problem. What is your approach to the assignment of tasks to machines by different operators, environments and ownership structures? What do you do when you are not able to rely on every party in the chain to come with a fair price on work? What do you do with a robot that must move across the ground of one operator into the middle of another operator? These are not bugs that can be patched in the future. They will be to be built into the foundation. The solution that fabric offers is to approach coordination as a public good - something that the network offers, and not something that a particular operator has any control over. Identity on the Fabric network, verifiable work history, and autonomous transaction are the benefits that robots get. The heart of this economy is the $ROBO token, which is employed in all manner of activities, including paying to perform them as well as harmonizing incentives among operators, deployers and the wider collective of participants. It is not just one of the tokens of governance that can be bolted on because it looks good but the internal economy of the network does flow. The question of who is allowed in is what is really interesting about the open network model. At this point, it takes a serious capital and institutional relationship to be involved in the robot economy. You have to purchase or rent a fleet, enter into contracts, organize the work. The model of fabric reduces that barrier to a minimum. Cordination services can be offered by someone who has technical skills and has no hardware. In deployments being operated by people with capital who have expertise, someone with capital and no expertise can affix. The network takes up the trust layer such that no one has to vet the other on a case by case basis. It is not an easy road to go recruiting real-world operators of the robot is less fast and less clean than recruiting DeFi users, and the stakes on failure are physical and not just financial. But the direction is right. The sectors that are prone to be shaken are the ones where the coordination layer is recreated as an open infrastructure before the incumbents know it is taking place. Fabric is betting on it in the area of robotics, and it is worth listening to. #ROBO