출처: Block Media
How Blockchain is Transforming the Robotics Industry
Blockchain technology is rapidly emerging as a critical infrastructure for revolutionizing the robotics sector through its applications in securing high-quality data, orchestrating robot collaboration, advancing open-source operating systems, and enabling a machine-driven economy. While humans primarily utilize conventional payment systems, robots require decentralized infrastructures to achieve seamless collaboration and autonomous transactions. This makes blockchain not just applicable but fundamentally vital for the future of robotics.
As Morgan Stanley forecasts the deployment of one billion humanoid robots globally by 2050, blockchain is well-positioned to underpin this sweeping transformation, marking an unprecedented convergence of these two groundbreaking technologies.
The Robotics-Cryptocurrency Convergence: A New Technological Horizon
By 2025, a new narrative is predicted to captivate the cryptocurrency sector: the Robotics Meta. Humanoid robots such as Tesla’s Optimus and Figure’s Helix are quickly advancing from experimental technologies to commercially viable products, heralding a new era for robotics. Far surpassing limited prototypes like SoftBank's Pepper from a decade ago, these robots are now capable of executing highly complex tasks.
This shift, from a futuristic aspiration to a present-day reality, is also reshaping priorities within the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. The convergence of robotics and blockchain technologies has the potential to create immense economic and societal value, introducing scalable solutions to long-standing challenges in data acquisition, collaboration, and economic integration.
Why Blockchain is Essential for Robotics’ Future
The meteoric rise of robotics owes much to the integration of artificial intelligence, which acts as the "brain" enabling robots to perceive, decide, and act autonomously. A recent demonstration by Google’s Gemini Robotics exemplifies how deeply AI and robotics are intertwined. However, significant hurdles persist in scaling robotics to a global level, including the scarcity of quality training data, the challenges of collaboration in multi-robot networks, and high hardware costs.
Blockchain has emerged as an essential solution to these obstacles. By offering decentralized, secure, and scalable mechanisms for sharing data, enabling coordination, and managing resources, blockchain technology is enabling the rise of new projects and adding momentum to robotics-focused cryptocurrency initiatives.
Securing High-Quality Data for Robotics
Robotics faces a glaring challenge in access to training data. While natural language and vision AI models benefit from vast datasets derived from the internet, robots require real-world physical interaction data—an asset that is far harder to obtain. Existing open-source datasets like Open X-Embodiment and DROID only scratch the surface of what robots need to adapt to the complexity of the real world.
Token-incentivized data collection models are proving to be transformative. For example:
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PrismaX has pioneered a data marketplace tying together remote operators and robots via teleoperation. Human operators guide robots through real-world tasks like folding laundry or stocking shelves, during which the robots autonomously capture motion trajectories and sensor data. Operators are rewarded with tokens, fostering scalable, diverse, and high-quality datasets.
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Over the Reality (OVR) incentivizes participants to create 3D maps of real-world environments using smartphones and cameras, rewarding contributors with tokens. With data from 150,000 mapped locations and over 70 million images already collected, robots can use these comprehensive spatial datasets for navigation in unfamiliar environments.
These examples highlight how blockchain-enabled tokenization is overcoming data scarcity challenges for robotics. Projects like PrismaX and OVR extend the scaling principles proven in AI and vision technologies into the realm of robotics, paving the way for robust learning systems grounded in real-world interactions.
Facilitating Robot Collaboration with Blockchain
Multi-robot environments present another significant barrier to commercialization. Robots must coordinate tasks, share information, and maintain system consensus, even when one or more robots experience malfunctions or act maliciously. Blockchain technology offers solutions through its Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanisms, smart contract automation, and decentralized consensus models.
For example, Sui, a Layer 1 blockchain, has introduced a cutting-edge multi-robot collaboration protocol. Designed with ultra-low latency, its Mysticeti consensus framework enables decentralized data sharing and dynamic task management among robots. This ensures operational harmony, even in scenarios involving robotic failures, making the orchestration of decentralized multi-robot systems not just viable but robust and scalable.
Blockchain-enabled coordination frameworks eliminate reliance on centralized servers, making it possible to establish serverless, fail-safe collaboration systems for robots across diverse industries.
Open-Source Robotics Operating Systems: Standardization Through Blockchain
Robotics development has historically been hindered by proprietary software ecosystems that limit interoperability and constrain innovation. Open-source operating systems (OS) offer a solution by promoting standardization and collaboration among manufacturers and developers.
One of the most prominent initiatives here is OpenMind, backed with $20 million in funding from Pantera Capital. Its OM1 platform, often referred to as the "Android for Robots," aims to unify robotics with a standardized OS that functions across diverse robot types. Just as Android fostered explosive growth in the smartphone industry, OM1 is designed to provide developers with a versatile, customizable OS for quadrupeds, humanoids, and other robotic forms. Early adoption by major robotics firms such as Unitree and Deep Robotics underscores its transformative potential.
The open-source model enables developers to bypass vendor lock-in and work within a collaborative ecosystem, facilitating quicker updates, enhanced compatibility, and rapid scaling. By lowering entry barriers, these advances are making robotics innovation more accessible and sustainable.
The Rise of MachineFi: Robots as Autonomous Economic Agents
As robots multiply and become more autonomous, an entirely new economic paradigm is emerging: robots as self-reliant financial actors. Termed "MachineFi," this vision imagines robots participating in economies not just as tools but as independent agents capable of buying, selling, and negotiating services autonomously. This shift requires new infrastructure for digital identity, transaction automation, and asset ownership.
Peaq, a blockchain focused on machine economies, captures this transformative potential. By assigning unique IDs to robots, Peaq allows them to operate as verifiable economic entities. On a pilot robotic farm in Hong Kong, for instance, robots autonomously grow and sell crops, generating income. Ownership of the farm is tokenized via NFTs, allowing profit-sharing among investors. Delivery robots could be similarly integrated, managing tasks like recharging or maintaining inventory through automated payments.
ExMachina’s planned tokenized robotic café in Europe further illustrates the MachineFi economy, where robots self-manage operations while token holders earn dividends. As Morgan Stanley’s projection of one billion humanoid robots by 2050 becomes reality, the MachineFi model will blur boundaries between labor and capital, opening up unprecedented possibilities for shared and distributed wealth.
Robotics: Catalyst for Blockchain’s Mainstream Usage
While blockchain adoption in finance and gaming has grown, its utility for human societies remains abstract due to the availability of alternative centralized systems. For robots, however, blockchain represents a fundamental necessity rather than an optional technology.
Robots operate in high-stakes environments requiring real-time collaboration, secure trust mechanisms, and precise transactional management. Centralized architectures are unable to match blockchain’s decentralized security, scalability, and automation capabilities. Blockchain’s ability to enable consensus, power smart contracts, and automate economic models further makes it indispensable for robotics.
In this context, blockchain may be better suited for robots than humans. If the projected billion-unit robotic economy materializes, blockchain technology will evolve from a niche innovation into the backbone of a robotic world. The once-speculative concept of blockchain robots could soon become the infrastructure supporting our future societies.
