Key Bottlenecks in the Robotics-Enabled Economy

The backbone for the robotics-enabled economy will be the compute power, data storage and security infrastructure that supports robotics applications and hardware. Much less industrial humanoid robots. However current web2 and even web3 infrastructure is not geared up for the unique requirements of AI-driven applications that interface with real world physical assets. From a compute power perspective, centralized clouds weren’t built to survey drones, steer forklifts, maneuvre surgical robotic arms or coordinate AI-enabled robotic assembly lines. A single point of failure means that when hardware goes down or latency stretches to a few hundred ms, critical jobs pause, highly calibrated processes freeze and tight margins get eaten into.

Some of these problems are solved by bringing robotics compute, storage and security infrastructure on-chain. However, robotics applications tend to be extremely bespoke with hardware-specific requirements that one-size-fits-all blockchains infrastructure cannot handle.

Meanwhile, from a tooling perspective, robotics ownership is a capital black hole. Fleets sit idle between contracts whilst companies still pay for hardware and maintenance costs. Whilst certain hardware for certain tasks is incompatible with certain hardware for other tasks, meaning inventory constantly has to be pieced together on a patchwork basis. Additionally, existing verticals that currently rely less on robotics such as LLM software, gaming apps, cloud services and more are built using infrastructure that is sub-optimal for the modular structure that easily allows for diverse robotics hardware to be integrated. This is problematic as almost every technology sector will soon need to integrate at least to some degree with robotics.

Finally, existing token economies fail to take advantage of the opportunity that the emerging robotics industry offers to ground incentives in automatable, trackable value. Proof-of-Work burns energy; Proof-of-Stake pays people for doing nothing. There’s no on-chain primitive that compensates a robot for real kilometers driven or pallets stacked. Without a purpose-built trust and coordination layer, the coming wave of embodied AI has nowhere reliable to dock.

Given that the entire global economy is about to become robotics-enabled, this is presents a multi-trillion dollar problem blocking AI-based solutions from connecting to the real world.