Talla, an artificial intelligence company founded in 2015, has launched BotChain, a blockchain platform that runs on Ethereum. Through it, companies register their bots with unique identity codes whil
Talla, an artificial intelligence company founded in 2015, has launched BotChain, a blockchain platform that runs on Ethereum. Through it, companies register their bots with unique identity codes while the system maintains an immutable record of every action.
The company identified a fundamental problem in the $50 billion autonomous bots market: the sector lacks the "universal standards or protocols of every other major software industry." Worse, corporations have no way to verify what their bots actually do. According to Talla's assessment, "There is also no verifiable visibility into bot decisions and actions. These conditions limit growth and present significant compliance risks for corporations."
Rob May, Talla's CEO, used an analogy to explain the concept. "BotChain does for bots and autonomous processes what a digital certificate proving ownership does for websites," he told MiningPool.
The business case runs deeper than accountability. As bots become more sophisticated, the line between human and machine blurs. "We are clearly close to a world where the differentiation between speaking with a human or bot becomes very ambiguous," May said. Talla built BotChain to address this: what May called "a single decentralized token curated registry of bots" allows humans and bots to verify AI agents through their ownership and identity records.
Recording bot activity on the blockchain prevents impersonation. Each bot carries its own unique code linked to its operator. Every action goes into an immutable ledger, giving companies and users a trustworthy audit trail. When problems surface, users can address them while ensuring bots stay within their intended parameters.
This verification layer also enables bots to work with one another. They can negotiate, collaborate, and transact without fear of dealing with imposters.
Decentralization shapes the approach. Rather than handing one company control of the registry, the blockchain ensures "companies can register their bots without fear of any one company having too much control," May explained.
Talla deployed BotChain on the Ethereum mainnet in May 2018. The company is now building identity and audit services modules, with an expected launch in November 2018.
Since its 2015 founding, Talla has raised over $12 million in venture capital. It's now running a private sale for BotCoin, the token powering transactions on the BotChain network. The company plans to hold pre-sales and a public sale later.
The company aims to drive adoption through tokenization. "Tokenization allows us to incentivize early participants who grow the network to the point where it becomes a standard, prompting others to join for those aspects," May said.
