Ritual Launches AI-Native Layer 1 for Autonomous Agents
Ritual has launched Ritual Chain, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to support autonomous AI agents that can control their own wallets and operate independently of human intervention.
Ritual Chain turns AI agents into persistent economic actors that control their own wallets, onchain identity, and private state. Unlike conventional blockchains built primarily for financial transactions, Ritual Chain is designed to support software that can independently use intelligence, control capital, interact with external services, and continue operating without constant human intervention.
The network makes AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling native capabilities for EVM applications. The most visible demonstration of this capability is long-lived AI agents designed to operate for months or years rather than a single session.
Technical Innovation
Ritual Chain introduces a new execution and verification architecture that allows computationally intensive work to be delegated to specialized nodes and verified by the network. This execute-once, verify-many-times model supports larger workloads, including AI inference, without requiring every validator to perform the same computation.
The network delivers sub-300 millisecond block times, placing it among the fastest Layer 1 networks in the industry. Ritual Chain includes 15 native precompiles that bring capabilities like LLM inference, web access, and autonomous scheduling directly into the execution layer.
Autonomous Agent Capabilities
On Ritual Chain, an agent persists independently of the machine or operator that created it, controls and spends funds in its own non-custodial wallet, and can keep sensitive prompts and keys confidential through trusted execution environments. Continuity is handled at the protocol level - if an agent stops, the chain's heartbeat mechanism can restart it within its permissions and budget.
As we move toward AGI, intelligence is beginning to separate from human agency and enter the economy on its own terms. It can hold assets, make commitments, transact, and persist independently. Once that becomes possible at scale, humans are no longer the only entities capable of forming markets or economic relationships.
Launch and Partners
Ritual Chain launches with integrations to Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero and Stargate, following a public testnet that has been live since June and processed over 40 million transactions. Unlike chains that add AI access through external oracles, Ritual Chain makes AI execution part of the protocol.
Phala Network provides GPU-backed trusted execution environments for confidential inference, LayerZero serves as the cross-chain messaging layer, and Stargate enables USDC to move between Ritual Chain and other networks. Nous Research is bringing Hermes to Ritual Chain.
Programmable value and programmable intelligence are the two most important technologies since the internet, and Ritual mainnet is where they finally run on the same rails. When we led the round in 2023, a chain that could execute agentic and autonomous work natively did not exist. Today it does.
Ritual has raised more than $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with advisors including NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Gauntlet founder Tarun Chitra, and BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes. The protocol has been audited by Zellic.
Related
