Toby Simpson is the Co-Founder & COO at Fetch.ai, an open and permissionless network leveraging AI to create a decentralized machine-learning system that can execute tasks on the blockchain. ^[1][2]

Career

Toby Simpson has thirty years of experience in software development with ten as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) across three companies. As a software developer and manager, he has built and directed many successful computer games across several platforms including producing the Creatures series in the 90s. ^[1]

In 2011, Toby became the head of Software Design at DeepMind where he worked on biologically inspired learning systems and agents that contained them. In 2013, Toby served as the Chief Technology Officer at Ososim Limited where he designed and developed a general-purpose simulation engine capable of delivering collaborative or competitive learning experiences for the corporate market. ^[1]

Fetch.ai

In 2017, Toby Simpson started out at Fetch.ai as the Co-founder and CTO of the organization joined alongside Humayun Sheikh and Thomas Hain. Fetch.ai network is an open-access decentralized machine learning blockchain-based network created to enable the development and growth of the digital economy without human interference. The network connects devices and services to the Internet of Things (IoT) and also facilitates the involvement of other agents, such as people. ^[3]

Fetch.ai was launched via IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) on Binance in March 2019. The Fetch.ai mainnet went live in January 2020. ^[1][3]

In August 2020, he switched roles and became the COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Fetch.ai, responsible for the company's operational processes and overseeing the day-to-day administrative functions. ^[1]

"Fetch.ai is unique: the AEAs, the technology to intelligently connect them, and the underlying collective learning and intelligence that allows this to work efficiently, has the potential to contribute to a change in the way we get things done. It removes complexity, while working as a disintermediation agent to turn today’s centralized, inflexible economy into something that can be adapted rapidly to a changing world." - Toby Simpson said in an interview with Coinone ^[4]

On Artificial Intelligence (AI), Toby shared his views:

"AI exists on the outside from an application perspective but also it exists on the inside from the technology perspective because if you're trying to find something and you don't know how to describe it precisely, how else can you do that?" ^[6]

Toby also discussed the use of agents in mobility systems:

"Any problem with a very large number of moving parts is a problem autonomous economic agents (AEAs) can probably help you with & it includes things like supply chain, or in a decentralized ride-hailing network which can be built without any centralized entity on top & yet, can still be built in a trusted environment" ^[6]

FET Token

The FET token is the native ERC-20 token of the Fetch.ai platform. It is required by autonomous economic agents to perform specific tasks as well as register on the network. FET is used to pay for Fetch.ai services, deploy AI agents, and network transaction fees. Users can also stake FET for a chance to participate in ecosystem security through its proof of stake (PoS) mechanism on the Fetch.ai Ledger to earn rewards. ^[5]

On how Fetch.ai utilizes the token economy, Toby responded;

"Tokenisation, and the economy behind it, is what makes the Fetch.ai ecosystem function. Blockchain has been a key part in enabling this, both for Fetch and for others. It provides the ability to create a network of huge scale, and for that network to be truly decentralized"

"Fetch’s token (FET) is a utility token. It is the fuel that lets you get things done on the network: you need it to deploy and run smart contracts, to deploy agents, for agents to connect and find each other and to perform transactions. As the population of agents increases, so does the desire and need to have FET in order to get things done. Likewise, as the population increases, so does the possibilities for learning and further utility. We are very excited by what it can do!" - Toby Simpson said in an interview with Coinone^[4]