When I look back at the first sparks of the Fabric Protocol I’m struck by how much of it began as a response to frustration. In the early 2020s robots were making headlines, but behind the glossy videos there was a problem: each manufacturer built its own operating system, its own tools and its own services. Jan Liphardt, a Stanford professor who had long worked at the intersection of bio‑engineering, distributed systems and AI, and Boyuan Chen, an MIT CSAIL graduate who had worked on reinforcement learning at a leading research lab, could see that robotics was headed toward a “knock‑off phone era.” Liphardt noted that more than 150 robotics manufacturers were building closed ecosystems, forcing developers to reinvent the same capabilities and preventing robots from interoperating. The machines “look like humans with hands and feet,” he said, “but lack a unified brain and nervous system,” meaning they could not hold identities, establish credit, or settle payments.
Liphardt and Chen formed a Silicon‑Valley company focused on robotic infrastructure. Their goal was to build two complementary products: OM1, a hardware‑agnostic operating system that would give robots perception, memory, reasoning and action in a single framework, and Fabric, a decentralized network that would give robots on‑chain identities, coordinate their work and handle economic settlement.
They spent years in the lab building prototypes and raising capital; the team secured a $20 million financing round in August 2025 led by an array of venture backers. Unlike many crypto projects that launch a token first and search for a use case later, they kept their technology off‑chain until it was ready to be used by real robots. Only after deploying OM1 and Fabric in real machines did the team press ahead with a token generation event, showing an unusual commitment to real‑world adoption.
OM1 is the answer to the question “how can robots think?” Traditional robotic operating systems handle motion control and navigation but leave perception and reasoning to external code. OM1 integrates seeing the world, remembering information, planning tasks and executing actions into one AI‑native operating system. The system supports mainstream large‑language models like GPT‑4o and Gemini and can run on diverse hardware, from humanoids to quadrupeds. The team open‑sourced OM1 under an MIT license and released a beta version in September 2025; it quickly attracted thousands of developers who tested it on robots from multiple manufacturers. In essence, OM1 provides a universal “brain + application platform” that makes it as easy to install skills on a robot as it is to download apps on a smartphone.
If OM1 addresses a single robot’s intelligence, Fabric addresses collaboration. In the project’s own research, Fabric is described as a “digital nervous system” that provides the core primitives of identity, location, verification and settlement for intelligent machines.
Each robot receives a cryptographically secure identity so that other robots and humans can verify it.
Proof‑of‑Location ensures that robots can prove their physical position in a tamper‑resistant way, while task verification records whether a job was successfully completed and triggers automatic payment.
Finally, a stablecoin settlement layer enables real‑time micropayments without the volatility of traditional cryptocurrencies
Fabric takes the Internet of Things beyond passive sensors. In the same research the team notes that connected devices merely report data, whereas Fabric connects active robots that use data to act and transact—for example, a machine paying a cooling drone 0.05 USDC to perform a timed cooling operation.
This difference is akin to comparing a global network of passive security cameras with an autonomous security guard network that actively coordinates actions and exchanges value.
Fabric therefore acts as a reality oracle for robots, allowing the network to collectively attest to events in the physical world
To bootstrap such a network, the team studied the journey from ride‑sharing to autonomous ride‑hailing. In the early phase of the robot economy, human tele‑operators will remotely guide robots through complex tasks, generating the data needed to train a collective intelligence.
But financing and incentivizing a global fleet of machines requires crypto primitives. The playbook suggests that decentralised finance will finance the fleet, allowing a community to invest in robots just as ride‑sharing investors financed cars.
Fabric’s decentralized model then incentivizes the network: owners purchase and deploy robots, while tele‑operators earn tokens by performing the initial work.
Stablecoins and high‑throughput blockchains provide the financial rails, ensuring payments occur at machine speed and scale.
By late 2025 and early 2026, the vision began to materialize. The team partnered with a stablecoin issuer to deploy the world’s first self‑charging point for robots in Silicon Valley. When a robot’s battery ran low, it would automatically navigate to a charging station, pay with a stablecoin, recharge and continue working no human needed. At the same time, the company introduced BrainPack, a plug‑and‑play backpack module that integrates high‑performance computing, sensors and the OM1 + Fabric software stack. BrainPack allows existing robots to be upgraded to AI‑native devices without waiting for new hardware.They also began building a robotic app store, enabling developers to create skills and applications that users can install with a click.Early applications for quadrupeds and humanoids went live by early 2026.
A non‑profit foundation was established to steward the network and to oversee governance and the upcoming token launch. As interest grew, the foundation announced in January 2026 that it would sell 0.5 % of the token supply in a public sale, aiming to raise $2 million at a $400 million fully diluted valuation.The sale was oversubscribed and followed by listings on major exchanges; by February 27 ROBO traded on an innovation zone, and by March 2026 trading volumes on big platforms exceeded $140 million in the first two days.
Community members including AI researchers, robotics developers, finance enthusiasts and tinkerers—began forming around the project’s forums and repositories, contributing code, testing deployments and brainstorming use cases. Because OM1 and Fabric were open‑source, the community could extend modules, improve tele‑operation tools and localize the system for different robot models.
ROBO is the native utility and governance token of the Fabric network. It was launched as an ERC‑20 token on Ethereum and later deployed on an EVM‑compatible chain.
ROBO has a fixed total supply of 10 billion tokens and no ongoing inflation.The foundation allocated the supply to ecosystem programs, investors, team members, reserves and airdrops. Allocations for investors and the team are subject to cliffs and multi‑year vesting schedules. The token’s design stresses that holding ROBO does not confer ownership or profit rights.
Instead, it serves as a utility for access and work bonds, transaction settlement, delegation and reputation, governance signaling, crowdsourced robot genesis and discretionary rewards. These functions create structural demand that scales with network utilization, operator capacity and governance participation.
Because Fabric sits at the intersection of robotics and decentralised finance, its success is not measured by token price alone. Serious observers monitor several real‑world and on‑chain metrics. They look at how many robots register on the identity system and how many human tele‑operators provide initial control; the first self‑charging network and BrainPack shipments provide early signs of usage.
They track transaction volume and settlement fees, the amount of ROBO staked in bonds, developer activity in the open‑source repositories, partnerships with hardware manufacturers and the adoption of the robotic app store. These numbers show whether the project is truly gaining strength or losing momentum.
I can remember the skepticism when news about an open robot economy first surfaced. Many in crypto were tired of vaporware, and robotics engineers doubted that a public ledger could provide real‑time coordination. This approach was different: build the core technology first, test it in the field, then launch a token that aligns incentives. Watching a robot autonomously navigate to a charging station and pay with a stablecoin was, for many, a moment of wonder. Seeing academics from top universities join forces with decentralised finance builders created an unusual synergy.
The road hasn’t been smooth. Hardware deployment cycles are long, and the costs of upgrading robots are high. Fragmented standards mean it takes significant effort to support each manufacturer. There is also regulatory uncertainty: because robots can settle payments autonomously, regulators may scrutinize anti‑money‑laundering controls. And because ROBO is explicitly not a security, the network must ensure that token usage doesn’t drift into speculative territory.
Yet there is a palpable sense of momentum. The oversubscribed public sale and rapid listing on major exchanges, combined with real‑world deployments, suggest a community eager to experiment. Early metrics such as thousands of developers testing OM1 partnerships with robotics manufacturers and the first machine‑to‑machine payments point to genuine adoption. If Fabric continues to execute its roadmap, the network could evolve into a neutral, verifiable ledger for the Internet of Machines, much like neutral standards for computing
The dream behind Fabric Protocol is audacious: a world where robots are not just obedient tools but economic actors that can identify themselves, collaborate, pay each other and improve over time. The initiative challenges the status quo of closed ecosystems and invites us to imagine a new machine economy where anyone can summon a machine to perform a task.
The technology is still young, and risks abound deployment is expensive, standards may not converge, and market cycles could dampen enthusiasm. More critically, the team must prove that its governance model can scale and that early token investors do not crowd out later participants.
Yet there is also real hope. By weaving together open‑source robotics, verifiable computing and economic incentives, the Fabric project is laying the foundations for a new machine economy. The commitment to deploying real products before launching a token, collaborations with established universities and hardware makers, and a focus on a neutral, public ledger all point toward a future where robots operate safely and transparently alongside humans. If this vision holds, the Fabric network may not only coordinate machines—it could give humanity new tools for abundance, creativity and cooperation.