[PRESS RELEASE – New York, United States, October 26th, 2026]
Ritual Chain turns AI brokers into persistent financial actors that management their very own wallets, onchain id, and personal state.
Ritual, a lab for autonomous intelligence based by former Polychain Capital companions Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, has launched Ritual Chain, an EVM-compatible Layer 1. Not like standard blockchains constructed primarily to execute monetary transactions, Ritual Chain is designed to help software program that may independently use intelligence, management capital, work together with exterior providers, and proceed working with out fixed human intervention. The community makes AI mannequin entry, personal computation, and autonomous scheduling native capabilities for EVM purposes.
This makes the explanation for constructing a brand new chain clearer whereas preserving the technical differentiation.
Essentially the most seen demonstration of that mixture is long-lived AI brokers, the type designed to function for months or years reasonably than a single session. An agent on Ritual Chain persists independently of the machine or operator that created it, controls and spends funds held in its personal non-custodial pockets, and might preserve delicate prompts and keys confidential from compute operators by means of trusted execution environments.
The community launches with integrations to Phala Community, Nous Analysis, LayerZero and Stargate, following a public testnet that has been stay since June and processed over 40 million transactions, each agent- and human-originated. Ritual Chain delivers sub-300 millisecond block occasions, putting it among the many quickest Layer 1 networks within the business. Ritual Chain consists of 15 native precompiles that convey capabilities like LLM inference, net entry, and autonomous scheduling immediately into the execution layer. The protocol has been audited by Zellic.
Ritual introduces a brand new execution and verification structure that permits computationally intensive work to be delegated to specialised nodes and verified by the community, avoiding the replicated execution required by most blockchains. This execute-once, verify-many-times mannequin permits the community to help far bigger workloads, together with AI inference, with out requiring each validator to carry out the identical computation.
Lengthy Horizon Brokers Require Devoted Blockchain Infrastructure
Most AI brokers as we speak stay inside a session: they run whereas a human is watching, on infrastructure another person controls, with an API key that may be revoked at any time. That’s superb for a chatbot. It doesn’t work for an agent meant to handle its personal treasury, run a recurring paid service, or coordinate with different brokers over lengthy durations. An extended-lived agent wants continuity that doesn’t depend upon its creator, capital it really controls, and privateness from the machines it runs on. On Ritual Chain, an agent’s state and id are held onchain, its scheduled work continues inside the permissions and price range it was given, and its delicate inputs could be processed inside trusted execution environments designed to protect them from node operators.
Continuity is dealt with on the protocol degree. If an agent stops, the chain’s heartbeat mechanism can restart it inside the permissions and price range it was given; no keeper community or off-chain cron job is required, and an agent’s state and id survive past its deployer’s involvement. Financial autonomy comes from agent-controlled wallets: an agent controls its personal funds, costs its personal providers, and settles its personal transactions with no human signer within the loop. For confidential workloads, trusted execution environments are designed to isolate an agent’s delicate prompts, keys, and technique information from the node operators working its compute.
“As we transfer towards AGI, intelligence is starting to separate from human company and enter the economic system by itself phrases. It might probably maintain belongings, make commitments, transact, and persist independently. As soon as that turns into attainable at scale, people are not the one entities able to forming markets or financial relationships. Ritual offers the infrastructure for these actors to exist and function on their very own,” mentioned Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual.
Ritual Chain Launches With Core Infrastructure Companions
Ritual Chain launches with its core infrastructure companions in place. Phala Community offers the GPU-backed trusted execution environments that run Ritual’s confidential inference, so delegated AI work executes on {hardware} that attests to what it ran. LayerZero serves because the community’s cross-chain messaging layer, with Stargate enabling USDC to maneuver between Ritual Chain and different networks from day one. On the appliance facet, Nous Analysis is bringing Hermes to Ritual Chain.
Not like chains that add AI entry by means of exterior oracles, Ritual Chain makes AI execution a part of the protocol. Good contracts can name a language mannequin, fetch information from the net, run personal computation, or schedule their very own future execution as immediately as they switch belongings. Builders deploy commonplace EVM contracts and achieve these capabilities with out new tooling.
Backed by Archetype and Polychain
Ritual has raised greater than $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with advisors together with NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra, and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes. Archetype led the corporate’s 2023 spherical.
“Programmable worth and programmable intelligence are the 2 most essential applied sciences for the reason that web, and Ritual mainnet is the place they lastly run on the identical rails. After we led the spherical in 2023, a series that might execute agentic and autonomous work natively didn’t exist. At the moment it does,” mentioned Ash Egan, Founder and Basic Associate of Archetype.
Builders can deploy from day one on exterior websites hosted at docs.ritualfoundation.org; the community explorer is at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.
About Ritual
Ritual is a lab for autonomous intelligence. Its first community, Ritual Chain, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 the place purposes can use AI fashions, entry exterior providers, and perform personal or scheduled work alongside onchain transactions, with delegated computation executed in trusted {hardware} and verified onchain. Based in 2023 by former Polychain Capital companions Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual has raised $30M+ from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with a group drawn from Polychain, DeepMind, a16z crypto, Flashbots, and Palantir. ritual.web
The put up Ritual Launches AI-Native Layer 1 for Autonomous Brokers appeared first on CryptoPotato.