CRYPTO 101 | Ep. 693 Recap: Inside the Fetch.ai & Ocean Rift with Humayun Sheikh

Date: December 2, 2025
Hosts: Bryce Paul & Brendan Viehman
Guest: Humayun Sheikh, Founder of Fetch.ai

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the recent turbulence within the Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) Alliance, focusing on the split between Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol. Humayun Sheikh, Fetch.ai’s founder, gives his perspective on the alliance’s promise, Ocean’s abrupt departure, the controversial token conversion, and the broader implications for AI and blockchain collaboration. The conversation also explores advances in agentic AI, competition with tech giants, the future of AI-first applications, and practical optimism about energy and technological scalability.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Founding & Purpose of the ASI Alliance

• Alliance Structure: The alliance, originally comprising Fetch.ai, Singularity, and Ocean—later joined by Kudos—was formed to create a deep, modular "tech stack" for decentralized AI.
• Tech Stack Components:
  • Fetch.ai: Agentic AI
  • Singularity: Advanced AI research and blockchain
  • Ocean: Data tools/data tokenization
  • Kudos: Decentralized compute
• Goal: Simplify the deployment of decentralized AI solutions, reducing technical and token friction.
  • “We felt very comfortable that our tech stack was and actually still is pretty much at the cutting edge. It’s probably one of the deepest tech stacks…in our crypto space.” — Humayun Sheikh [02:55]

2. The Ocean Rift: Token Controversy & Fallout

Background

• Ocean was to provide a large pool of community reward tokens (50% of supply) as incentives for building out the ecosystem.
• A vision paper detailed the 10–20 year roadmap for fair token distribution.

What Went Wrong [04:00–12:50]

• Ocean decided to leave the alliance, which Humayun characterizes as their right.
• Before leaving, Ocean converted a massive share of the alliance reward tokens (meant for community projects) into FET tokens and began selling them.
• Fetch.ai discovered this, first suspecting a hack, but learned Ocean had rebranded its custodial structure and claimed full right to the tokens.

Allegations & Impact

• Humayun alleges misrepresentation and calls it, essentially, a rug pull:
  • “You can’t just convert all the tokens, convert it into FET and then dump it on the community. That’s not right. It’s meant for community tokens. You’ve declared this going to be done over 10 years.” [13:14]
• Damage to trust, legal action underway, and assertion that this is a landmark case in crypto (class action for misrepresentation).

Notable Exchange:

• “If you made a misrepresentation about that many tokens…about that much money, you know, I would be bordering into fraud.” — Humayun Sheikh [19:59]
• “It sounds like you were defrauded in a sense.” — Brendan [20:12]

Legal Follow-up:

• Case filed in the Southern District of New York, potentially precedent-setting for crypto-law intersection. [21:07]

3. Transparency, DAOs, and Lessons in Decentralization

• DAO Misrepresentation: Humayun claims Ocean Foundation falsely portrayed control as a DAO but actually kept private custody.

• Key Security Lapse: Fetch trusted Ocean’s process, later realizing the lack of genuine decentralized governance.

  • “Turns out that it wasn’t actually…there was no DAO-like behavior, unfortunately…The representations that were made were incorrect.” — Humayun Sheikh [17:48]

• Ideal Resolution:

  • Logical outcome would be compensation/remediation for the affected community—tokens returned/distributed as promised.
  • Highlighted the irony of Ocean’s departing with alliance tokens under the banner of “more decentralization.” [24:12–26:44]

4. Moving Forward: Focus on Technology & Agentic AI

Adoption & Product Traction [28:02–31:29]

• ASI1 Platform:

  • Users can create and personalize AI agents without coding, connect calendars, schedule meetings, and much more.
  • Over 2.7 million agents active; significant daily user growth (10-15k new users daily).
  • “...with ASI1, you go in and click a few buttons...and you can actually have your own agent right out of the box.” — Humayun Sheikh [28:26]

• Stack Vision:

  • Top Layer: Agentic, autonomous AI applications

  • Middle Layer: Expert models, orchestrated by large language models

  • Bottom Layer: Massive, efficient decentralized compute (helped by partners like Kudos)

  • Drawing parallel analogies to the web/p>

  • “In AI first, your application layer is going to be agentic…agents are more cognitively aware, they're autonomous, can be autonomous, they can do things, they can have intelligence...” [34:04]

5. Competing with Big Tech & Industry Future

• Competing with Giants:
  • Alliance built to aggregate resources and stay nimble, focusing on useful applications rather than brute-force capital arms races.
  • “To compete…to actually create solutions which are at least comparative to these big entities…we’ve actually done a pretty decent job of building this whole stack.” [40:37]
• Current Ecosystem:
  • Unlike Meta, X.ai, or even OpenAI, decentralized approaches allow rapid customization and personalization, with real-world utility spread beyond crypto-centric audiences.

6. Market Parallels, Energy, and Sustainability

Dot-Com Comparison & Boom/Bust Cycles

• Current AI build-out likened to the broadband/telco boom—potential for over-investment in compute, but it also sets up the next wave of killer applications.
• “Everybody was going out, spending money…all they were doing were building infrastructure. And then everybody realized once the infrastructure is done, you need applications…that’s kind of where we are in this phase…” [44:05]

Energy Considerations

• AI center construction is increasingly efficient (new data centers, containerized nuclear discussed).
• AI will ultimately optimize its own energy use.
  • “I’m more optimistic about it because…I feel this is obviously a growth pattern which is happening.” — Humayun Sheikh [47:53]
  • “We’re going to use actually AI to improve the efficiency of these centers which we're building.” [48:10]

7. Market Dynamics & Investment Perspective

Michael Burry’s Short, Valuations, and Bubble Talk:

• Humayun’s take: Shorting is rational at these insane valuations—but he’s more pro-Palantir/Nvidia in the longer run.
• Expresses concern over artificially inflated circular economies (advance sales revenue, tokens).
  • “It’s like a runaway train…it’s kind of creating its own steam…that is slightly dangerous.” [51:41]

8. What’s Next for Fetch.ai & the Alliance?

Six- to Twelve-Month Outlook [54:12–58:50]

• Key Deliverables:
  • Real-world adoption of ASI1 platform and agentic web—scaling beyond crypto.
  • Upcoming launch of AI-centric, sharded blockchain for scaling model and compute-specific workloads.
  • More “Earn and Burn” mechanisms and compute platforms coming online.
  • “The whole stack is really, really working well and I’m really excited about it.” — Humayun Sheikh [58:29]

Public Challenge:

• “I challenge anybody and everybody to come and have a look at the technology and say anybody has a better technology…” — Humayun Sheikh [58:50]
• “We’re not just a crypto project. We are outside of crypto—that scale is much bigger.” [58:50]

Notable Quotes

• “We did [the alliance] because we felt we need to build a tech stack…to make it so coherent so that everybody can deploy a solution and don’t have to worry about too many tokens…” — Humayun Sheikh [02:55]
• “...that’s called a rug pull. So that’s what I’m saying. You guys tried to do a rug pull.” — Humayun Sheikh [14:17]
• “I’m not fighting for myself. I’m fighting for the project and the community.” — Humayun Sheikh [20:18]
• “Fate loves irony.” — Brendan [24:12]
• “We have like 2.7, 2.8 million agents…majority of them have a purpose.” — Humayun Sheikh [29:16]
• “AI needs multiple components, just like web did…we need all of them effectively. It’s crazy.” — Humayun Sheikh [39:04]
• “We’re not giving up. This is a small hiccup. We’re going to recover from it. We’re going to be back to where we should be.” — Humayun Sheikh [58:50]

Key Timestamps

• 01:59–07:49: Alliance structure and rationale, initial vision, Ocean’s departure
• 13:14–16:34: Token conversion controversy, legal actions
• 17:14–21:07: Decentralized governance issues, misrepresentation, legal context
• 28:02–31:29: Agentic AI in action, platform adoption, user growth
• 33:36–40:37: Building the agentic web, orchestration of expert models, infrastructure needs
• 47:53–51:41: AI, energy, and the path to sustainability
• 54:12–58:50: Roadmap, new platform features, next-gen blockchain, future vision

In short:
This episode provided a candid look at the turbulence within the ASI Alliance, the nuts and bolts of decentralized AI progress, and Fetch.ai’s determination to maintain momentum despite setbacks. It’s a crucial listen for anyone navigating the AI/blockchain intersection—whether for its lessons in governance, technology, or idealism.