Fetch.ai price

The robotics narrative has finally caught the mindshare of CT long after I’ve published the original thesis back in March. And there has been one person in particular who has really captured the upside of this opportunity. Andrew Kang has been one of the few people on CT who has been beating the drum on robotics well before it became the narrative crossover. If you remember, in February of last year, Kang made a $19M investment into Figure Robot, quoting that we’re likely at an inflection point in robotics as recent advancements in AI have continued to accelerate this industry. What really stuck out was a post from earlier this year, where he compared the opportunity of humanoid robotics to that of Bitcoin in 2013, only with larger TAM. And his claims that this sector will reach “decatrillions” isn’t necessarily unwarranted, assuming the already existing consensus view that related technologies, like AI, will also reach similar valuations someday. But how do we come to the conclusion that the TAM is potentially larger than Bitcoin, and the outlandish claims of “decatrillions”? Of course, with the commercialization of humanoid robots. An asymmetric opportunity, with potential geopolitical implications that can shift the dynamics of global manufacturing dominance. The implementation of humanoid robots would likely cause an equalizing effect on cost of production globally. China’s diminished dominance in cheap labor would likely lead to a rebalancing and re-shoring of domestic manufacturing. However, not all of this is entirely optimistic for the labor force. Initially, there would likely be a supply-demand gap which would indeed provide more jobs; although, this demand would eventually be offset by the growing number of robots being built to automate a vast majority of the manufacturing jobs. This has already been the case, as Figure Robot announced BotQ earlier this year, a high-volume robot manufacturing facility scaling production exponentially. The idea here is that the TAM is equivalent to that of completely automating global manufacturing. What’s the Ticker? The problem is, even if this thesis is right, how do we degens on CT get exposure to Robotics? Well, aside from getting direct exposure from companies like Figure Robot, and Apptronik, the next best option would be indirectly through publicly traded companies that produce the hardware/ software components (similar to how Nvidia was a proxy bid on AI). The only issue is that your upside is capped since most of the existing options are already multi-billion-dollar companies. Try telling that to the degens aping 100k market cap shitters. Not to mention, the general public doesn’t have the access to invest in the newer robotics startups that an accredited investor would normally have – the same dilemma with investing in the private AI labs. My thesis preceding the agents rotation was that all these so-called “AI agents” were nothing but vaporware. It’s not that I don’t believe in the long-term success of AI intersecting with crypto, but more so the fact that crypto tends to front run narratives well ahead of their time. Take prediction markets as an example. We had Augur in 2017, well before prediction markets even worked as a concept. The same goes for every other narrative, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that robotics is an exception to the rule. Robotics as an industry itself most certainly will come with its asymmetric returns however. That being said, it’s finally gaining momentum within crypto. And like the AI and agents narrative, it’s bound to show a similar pattern in speculative bids for tokens that brand as “robotics” and ride on the coattails of the current hype. Robotics as a subsector in crypto has already been established, with coingecko even making a category for “robotics” tokens. The only thing remaining is the right catalyst to push this narrative further. This is exactly how AI tokens had their first and second wave rallies over the last couple years – highly influenced and triggered by the breakthrough advancements in the pure AI industry itself. The public reaction to ChatGPT in late 2022 kicked off the early rally among what was deemed to be “dead” AI tokens from previous cycles. The speculation on agents late last year brought a new cohort of AI tokens including Virtuals and ai16z. In fact, agent tokens deployed on Virtuals had their own isolated rally, completely uncorrelated from the previous runners of the first AI wave. Past performers like $TAO, $RNDR, and $FET were flat or down on the year. And it seems like the thesis is finally playing out. It wouldn’t surprise me if some big breakthrough coming out of these robotics companies or Elon shilling Optimus were to trigger a full-blown robotics led rally. But it doesn’t take much to launch a token and slap on the tagline in the guise of robotics. I can probably name a handful of L1s that have done the same thing by pivoting to AI throughout last year. It’s still early, and the number of quality projects in this domain are far and few in between; but that isn’t to say we won’t be flooded with robotics vapor similar to the agent slop we got last year. However, I’m optimistic that when the market settles, we’ll have a few legitimate gems that survive and the overall robotics market cap will be much larger than its current ~$480B valuation. Until then we ride the wave of narratives.