What is fetched_at?
fetched_at is the ISO-8601 timestamp Hive Intelligence attaches to every tool response — recording exactly when the underlying data was retrieved from the upstream provider.
A typical Hive tool response includes:
{
"tool": "get_price",
"result": {
"bitcoin": { "usd": 67421.50 },
"ethereum": { "usd": 3245.80 }
},
"fetched_at": "2026-05-03T14:23:18Z",
"provider": "coingecko"
}
The agent reads fetched_at to know exactly how fresh the data is — and can cite that timestamp when grounding an answer.
Why this matters
AI models have training cutoffs. They know the world as of some date in the past — often months, sometimes years — before the current conversation. For most crypto data (prices, TVL, funding rates, wallet balances) the training-cutoff value is the wrong answer; the live value is what the user wants.
Without an explicit freshness signal, an agent answering "what's the price of ETH?" might return a value from its training data, presented as if it were current. With fetched_at, the agent knows whether it's reasoning over live data or training-cutoff knowledge — and grounds its answer in the right source.
Hive normalizes the freshness signal as fetched_at across every tool response. CoinGecko returns last_updated on some endpoints; Moralis returns block_timestamp on chain-data endpoints. The naming differs, but the principle — explicit freshness — is what separates grounded agent answers from hallucinated ones.