- Published on
The Physical Internet Is Coming
- Authors
- Name
- Mikhail Liublin
- https://x.com/mlcka3i
The Physical Internet Is Coming
The internet ate the world of bits. Now it's coming for atoms.
Breaking Out of the Lab
Humanoid robots are breaking out of the lab and onto the factory floor. The founders building them speak with quiet inevitability. The tech still trips, stumbles, and drops things—but the consensus is clear: these are temporary bugs, not permanent blockers. The breakthroughs are close enough to smell.
The transformation feels inevitable because the economics are relentless. We're witnessing the early stages of what could be the most significant industrial revolution since the assembly line.
From Proof-of-Concept to Physical Infrastructure
In 2025, only ~150 humanoid robots are in active U.S. pilots—Tesla in factories, Amazon's Digit, BMW's Figure-01, Mercedes-Benz's Apptronik. But the pattern is familiar:
20 robots in a pilot
→ 200 robots in one production line
→ thousands across multiple facilities
By 2030, our internal model projects ~820,000 humanoids deployed globally. That's not niche—it's industrial scale.
Why? The economics are relentless. Human labor is the world's largest "market" at 82B–1T+ is more realistic.
The Physical Turing Test
When ChatGPT landed, it passed the cultural Turing Test—good enough at language that millions changed their workflows overnight. Robotics awaits its equivalent: the Physical Turing Test.
Picture a robot entering your post-party kitchen, cleaning everything without you lifting a finger, and doing it so well you can't tell if a human or machine did it. Today, we're maybe 10x too slow and 10x too clumsy. Closing that gap means building generalist policies—robotic brains that can adapt to new environments without a full rewrite.
The moment a humanoid nails the Physical Turing Test, adoption will spike. Costs will collapse. And the revolution will accelerate beyond all predictions.
The Data Gap
Robots learn slower than software. They train on millions of examples, not trillions. Sensors wear out. Humans won't tolerate trial-and-error in their living rooms.
Two ways forward:
Simulation
Billions of safe, cheap, accelerated trials. The bottleneck is the "sim-to-real" gap—physics and perception never match perfectly. Even the most sophisticated simulators struggle with the chaos of real-world environments.
Real-World Data
Human teleoperation, motion-capture crowdsourcing, and multimodal sensor fusion. Harder to scale, but it grounds models in reality. This is where the rubber meets the road—literally.
The winning teams will combine both—like Waymo's mix of simulated and real-world miles. The companies that crack this data problem first will have an insurmountable advantage.
Enter Crypto: Coordination for Atoms
Where does crypto fit into this robotic revolution?
Robotics is a data-scarce, capital-intensive, coordination problem. Crypto is an incentive and governance engine—perfectly positioned to solve the coordination challenges that traditional systems can't handle.
Data Markets
"Clean-to-earn" or "drive-to-earn" robots that reward operators for generating high-quality data. Imagine getting paid for every successful robotic task you demonstrate, with tokens flowing to the most valuable training examples.
On-Chain Governance
Open registries of robotic behaviors and safety rules—auditable, forkable, enforceable via code. No more black-box algorithms controlling physical systems. Everything becomes transparent and democratically governed.
Machine-to-Machine Payments
Robots paying each other for electricity, sensor access, or skills, enforced by smart contracts. A robot running low on battery could automatically negotiate with nearby charging stations. A cleaning robot could purchase navigation data from delivery robots that know the building layout.
The first prototypes exist—Frodobots' tokenized teleop games, Reborn's crowdsourced motion capture, PrismaX's decentralized control layer, OpenMind's trust fabric for autonomous teams.
The Network Effects Begin
The real magic happens when these systems start talking to each other. Just as the internet's value exploded when networks connected to other networks, the Physical Internet will emerge when robots begin sharing data, capabilities, and coordination.
Imagine:
- Fleet Learning: Every robot's experience immediately benefits every other robot
- Dynamic Task Allocation: Robots automatically redistributing work based on real-time capabilities and demand
- Emergent Behaviors: Complex coordination arising from simple rules, like flocking birds or swarming bees
The Inflection Point
This feels like EVs in 2013: expensive, awkward, still niche—but with a clear path to scale. The infrastructure is being built. The talent is assembling. The capital is flowing.
Tesla went from 22,000 deliveries in 2013 to 1.8 million in 2023. The robotics curve could be even steeper because:
- Software Leverage: Once solved, robotic behaviors can be copied instantly
- Manufacturing Scale: Robotics companies don't need to build charging networks
- Economic Pressure: Labor shortages create immediate demand
Rootics: The Operating System of the Physical World
The moment a humanoid nails the Physical Turing Test, adoption will spike. Costs will collapse. And the Physical Internet—robots moving through the real world with the same inevitability as packets over TCP/IP—will arrive faster than the consensus expects.
Bits rewired media, finance, and communication. Atoms are next.
The robotics stack—will be the operating system of the physical world. It will coordinate billions of physical agents, optimize resource allocation in real-time, and enable new forms of human-machine collaboration that we can barely imagine today.
The infrastructure is being laid. The protocols are being defined. The future is being built, one robot at a time.
What's Next?
The Physical Internet isn't science fiction—it's engineering. The pieces are coming together, and the acceleration is about to begin.
The question isn't whether this future will arrive, but who will build it and how quickly they can scale. The companies and communities that understand this transition will have the opportunity to shape the physical world for generations to come.
The internet ate software. Now it's coming for everything else.
Are you building in the robotics space? What coordination challenges do you see that crypto could solve? Share your thoughts on how the Physical Internet might reshape our world.