Fetch.ai (FET -5.94%), one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies so far this year, added to its gains on Thursday. As of late-afternoon trading, the token was up by 11% in price, thanks largely to news of an "alliance" its developer is entering.
A three-chain merger
Fetch.ai is an attempt to monetize artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities. It's not the only one and, sensibly, its developer is combining forces with two other peers.
On Thursday, it was announced that Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNET are creating an AI collective. The Ocean and SingularityNET tokens will be merged into that of Fetch.ai; the supercharged new token will be known as ASI -- which stands for "artificial superintelligence."
All told, the total supply of ASI is to be roughly 2.63 billion tokens, with a starting price of $2.82 apiece. This will give it an initial market cap of around $7.4 billion.
Decentralized and ready to take on heavy competition
The alliance aims to build a decentralized and open AI platform, which should be immediately compelling to investors and attention-grabbing for the general public.
AI continues to be the hot area of interest in the tech sector for many investors. That has pumped up the share prices not only of specialty AI companies, but also industry incumbents such as Microsoft.
If the alliance can build and deploy AI functionalities that resonate with developers and users, it stands a fighting chance of being a competitor to those determined "big tech" companies. After all, the effective combining of forces is preferable to going it alone.
