Family, Fan Fan just squeezed out of the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, with buzzing motor sounds in his head.
In the past few days, everyone in the circle has been discussing one thing: a global embodied intelligence conference held in Shenzhen, with Yushu, UBTECH, and Zhiyuan all present. What was the most eye-catching operation on site? A humanoid robot made coffee live, seamlessly from grabbing the cup to pouring the water. A group of elderly people surrounded it, taking photos like crazy, and one elderly lady even asked, 'Can this thing be taken home to clean the house?'
The comment section is full of 'Cyber Nanny is here' and 'The workers are completely unemployed.'
But Fanfan was staring at the coffee-making machine, and a question popped into his mind: how does it know where the cup is? How does it know how much water to pour? How does it know what to do next after brewing coffee?
This is not just nitpicking. Think about it; current robots look pretty impressive, capable of dancing and flipping, but essentially, they are still 'puppets'—you write a piece of code for them, and they perform one task. Change the environment, change the cup, change the lighting, and they might just get confused.
It's like asking a chef who can only recite recipes to cook; when the recipe says 'a pinch of salt', he gets confused—how much is a pinch? He doesn't know.
What robots lack is not arms and legs, but a thinking 'brain'.
And this is precisely the coolest part of @FabricFND and $ROBO —they really gave robots a brain that can think.
The 'Android moment' for robots.
Fanfan has previously written several articles about Fabric, discussing verifiable computation, staking mechanisms, and computing power pools. But seeing the performance of those robots in Shenzhen with my own eyes made me truly understand one thing: the OM1 system may be the most underrated breakthrough in the robotics industry.
Have you heard the story of Android? Back when Nokia was at its peak, Google created an open-source system that all phone manufacturers could use. And what happened? Now, 80% of the smartphones in the world run on Android.
Fabric's OM1 aims to be the Android for robots.
Let's take a look at what backgrounds these people have:
Founder Jan Liphardt, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford, has worked on AI, biological computing, and distributed systems.
CTO Boyuan Chen, who comes from MIT CSAIL, has worked at Google's DeepMind, specializing in reinforcement learning and embodied intelligence.
Advisor Steve Cousins, former CEO of Willow Garage, a key promoter of the ROS ecosystem (What's ROS? The Robot Operating System, the industry standard).
These people are not just speculators in the crypto circle; they are a hardcore team that has actually worked on complex hardware and real-world deployments. They have raised $22 million from Pantera Capital, Sequoia China, and Coinbase Ventures, which is no small sum.
So what exactly is OM1's strength?
Traditional robotic systems, like ROS, mainly handle 'movement'—controlling motors, planning paths, avoiding obstacles. But OM1 is different; it handles the 'thinking' tasks.
Seeing the world: cameras, lidar, voice sensors, perceiving the surrounding environment.
Remembering information: long-term memory systems to save environmental and historical data.
Thinking tasks: integrating large models like GPT-4o and Gemini to understand instructions and plan actions.
Executing actions: converting thought results into control commands to make robots move.
In simple terms, previous robots were 'physically strong but mentally simple'; OM1 has given them a brain that can think.
What's even more exciting is that OM1 is hardware-agnostic—regardless of whether it's the dog from Unitree, the humanoid from UBTECH, or the machines from Yunsen, they can all run this system. It has already adapted to various forms such as the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, quadruped robots, Dobot robotic arms, and more.
What does this mean? In the future, developers won't need to rewrite code for each brand of robot; write once, run everywhere. This is the Android approach.
The 'WeChat' and 'Alipay' for robots.
But having just a brain is not enough. In the real world, robots rarely operate in isolation.
Imagine in the future, a warehouse could have Unitree's delivery robots, UBTECH's handling robots, and Yunsen's inspection robots running simultaneously. How will they coordinate? Who commands whom? How will transactions be settled?
This is what the FABRIC network is doing.
If OM1 is the 'brain' of robots, FABRIC is the 'WeChat + Alipay' for robots—it gives each machine a blockchain identity (DID), allowing devices to be recognized, build credit, record behaviors, and even automatically complete payment settlements.
Every machine connected to the network is bound to a $ROBO account. When a delivery robot runs low on battery, it can automatically scan nearby charging stations and use $ROBO to pay USDC for electricity. The whole process requires no human involvement; the machine completes 'working for money' and 'paying the bill' by itself.
This kind of machine-to-machine (M2M) payment sounds like science fiction, but it is already being tested.
What does Ning Fan think?
There was an interesting detail at the Shenzhen exhibition: the humanoid robot Walker X from UBTECH performed live demonstrations of opening bottles and pouring water, its movements as smooth as a real person. But I noticed that every time it switched to a new bottle, it paused for a few seconds—it's re-identifying and recalculating.
What does this indicate? The 'brain' of the robot is still thinking, but it's not fast enough.
What the people at Fabric are doing is making the brain work faster, smarter, and more universally. OM1 has already appeared at the Nasdaq ETF listing ceremony, where the humanoid robot equipped with OM1 participated in the listing kickoff. This is not a PPT; it's the real deal.
An old brother at Gate Square said it well: 'In this circle, choosing a project is like finding teammates; you need to choose those with a solid foundation, good cooperation, and long-term planning. I believe #ROBO is a potential candidate. Every bit of accumulation now may be paving the way for the arrival of that robot era.'
Fanfan thinks this statement is very insightful.
@Fabric Foundation #ROBO #robo $ROBO
