I’ve been thinking about Fabric Foundation and the Fabric Protocol a bit more than usual. Originally I saw it as one of the usual robotics projects with a bunch of blockchain tacked on in hopes of making money. The more I look into it though, the more I think most people have it wrong and I think the actual innovation that was made here is being lost on people. To me the actual innovation isn’t anything to do with blockchains, or even robots: it’s more a matter of breaking data down into two separate components the actual data itself, versus the proof that says that data is accurate.
Reading about robotics really opened my eyes to how it all works. Robots essentially collect a ton of data which they use to complete various tasks this can be in the form of video, sensor readings, path histories, reports on their tasks etc. trying to put this data onto the blockchain would take up an incredible amount of space on the blockchain, lead to very slow transactions as well as high costs and most importantly be quite hard to manage. In the end, there is far less data that is actually relevant to be recorded on the blockchain more like a confirmation or hash that the data actually exists, that the work has been completed and that the payment has been processed for the right person.
The quiet advantage i keep noticing with fabric is that fabric isn’t trying to force every piece of information onto crypto. Rather than trying to turn everything into something cryptographically verifiable, it can just be verifiable and settleable. What ends up happening is that coordination is cheaper, done in a less cumbersome way, costs are lower for everyone involved and for whoever is trying to build or run a system.
I think this part of the whitepaper is more important than the hype. The proof layer is where the robot economy will really be able to scale. This is where things get interesting.