An Intro to Resiliency, DHT, and Autonomous Economic Agents

What is resiliency and fault tolerance (DHT) and why does it matter?

According to the paper published by Lokman Rahmani et al., the S/Kademlia distributed hash table (DHT) used by the ACN is resilient against malicious attacks and faults. After a short grace period, the rest of the peers drop the failing or disconnected peer from their networks. As the data at the failed peer has already been replicated, there will be no loss of data. This helps reduce the risk of Sybil attacks, in which a user joins the DHT under a false identity.

Employing security-relevant hashing algorithms for the consistent hashing scheme makes it challenging for hackers to coordinate a denial-of-service attack against a single peer. This mechanism provides data protection during transfers to Dapp users using Fetch.ai.

Why Do Autonomous Economic Agents Matter for Users and DeFi?

In a decentralized setting, it may be difficult to provide safe and reliable communication amongst autonomous agents with varying levels of support from different stakeholders. Participation in the system must be open and not need special authorization for agents to be able to discover and interact with one another. To solve this issue, Fetch.ai introduced the Agent Communication Network (ACN), a peer-to-peer lookup system that operates as a distributed overlay over the Internet. The ACN allows agents to discover one another and to interact securely. It does this by employing a distributed hash table for agent lookup, maintained by participating peers and via the use of public-key cryptography.

Distributed overlays are built upon the existing distributed systems database table (DHT). Comparable to traditional hash tables, DHTs Maintain a database of associated keys and values. This is done, however, in comparison to a number of peers. Its consistent hashing method determines which pairs will be placed with which peers. The peers self-organize according to a specified topology, creating a structured overlay for efficient peer routing and pair retrieval. This method provides a novel approach to authenticating databases and access without sharing key-level security. This can be a game changer for companies who want to transfer data in a peer-to-peer environment.

What is Fetch.ai?

Fetch.ai is an autonomous machine-to-machine ecosystem in which agents function as a distributed network of independent parties that communicate with one another in a decentralized manner over the blockchain. When two or more agents agree, the transaction is recorded on the FET blockchain on the Fetch.ai platform. The FET token, unique to the Fetch.ai blockchain, can be used to compensate agents for their services and is the primary means of payment for all transactions happening in the data ecosystem.

Fetch.ai has onboarded 40,000 users to its blockchain and data-based artificial intelligence platform, which uses Autonomous Economic Agents (AEA) to provide users with database automation, storage and hosting features.

The Fetch.ai platform was developed by the Fetch.ai artificial intelligence lab, which was established in 2017 and debuted in March 2019 via an initial exchange offering (IEO) on Binance. The Cambridge AI lab is developing blockchain-specific artificial intelligence.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, Fetch.ai scaling its user base is critical for developing the DeFi and open data ecosystem where the data is in the control of the users, not the corporates. For this, it is critical to have mechanisms where the data can be stored and protected in transit or rest, per data protection regulatory requirements.

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Image credits: PR Guerilla Buzz.