Ritual launches AI-Native Layer 1 for autonomous agents, EVM-compatible

This new chain enables AI agents to function as independent economic participants, possessing control over their own wallets, onchain identities, and private states. While typical blockchains are primarily constructed for executing financial exchanges, Ritual Chain is engineered to support software capable of operating autonomously, managing capital, interacting with external services, and continuing its functions without constant human oversight.

The network integrates native features for AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling within EVM applications, thereby clarifying the necessity for a new chain while maintaining technical distinction. The most evident illustration of this combination is the existence of long-lived AI agents, which are designed to operate over months or even years, rather than just for a single interaction. An agent operating on Ritual Chain maintains its existence independently of the machine or individual who initially created it, manages and spends the assets held in its own non-custodial wallet, and can keep confidential keys and prompts private from the compute operators through the use of trusted execution environments.

The network commences operations with integrations to Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero, and Stargate. This follows a public testnet that has been operational since June and has managed more than 40 million transactions, encompassing both agent-driven and human-initiated activities. Ritual Chain boasts block times under 300 milliseconds, positioning it among the industry's swiftest Layer 1 networks. Furthermore, the chain incorporates 15 native precompiles, which directly embed functionalities such as web access, LLM inference, and autonomous scheduling into the execution layer. Zellic has audited the protocol.

A novel execution and verification structure is introduced by Ritual, allowing computationally demanding tasks to be assigned to specialized nodes, with the network subsequently verifying these tasks, thus circumventing the need for replicated execution common in most blockchains. This model, which involves execute-once and verify-many-times, permits the network to handle significantly larger workloads, including AI inference, without every validator needing to perform the identical computation.

Currently, most AI agents exist within a limited session—they run while a person is observing, on infrastructure managed by someone else, utilizing an API key that can be revoked at any moment. This setup is adequate for a chatbot, but it fails for an agent intended to manage its own treasury, execute a recurring paid service, or coordinate with other agents across extended durations. A long-term agent requires persistence that is not contingent upon its creator, capital that it truly controls, and privacy from the hardware it utilizes.

On Ritual Chain, an agent's identity and state are recorded onchain, its scheduled tasks proceed within the parameters and budget it was allocated, and its sensitive inputs can be processed within trusted execution environments designed to shield them from node operators. The protocol handles continuity: if an agent ceases operation, the chain's heartbeat mechanism can reinstate it within its given permissions and budget; this eliminates the need for an off-chain cron job or a keeper network, ensuring the agent's state and identity survive beyond the involvement of its deployer.

Economic self-governance is achieved through agent-controlled wallets: an agent manages its own funds, sets its own service prices, and settles its own transactions without requiring a human signature in the process. For confidential computations, trusted execution environments are built to isolate an agent's strategic data, keys, and sensitive prompts from the node operators running its computation. Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual, stated, "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. Ritual provides the infrastructure for those actors to exist and operate on their own."

Ritual Chain debuts with several key infrastructure partners already integrated. Phala Network supplies the GPU-backed trusted execution environments necessary for Ritual's confidential inference, meaning delegated AI work runs on hardware that confirms what it processed. LayerZero functions as the network's cross-chain messaging layer, while Stargate facilitates the movement of USDC between Ritual Chain and other networks from the beginning. On the application front, Nous Research is introducing Hermes to Ritual Chain. A key distinction is that Ritual Chain incorporates AI execution directly into the protocol, unlike chains that append AI access via external oracles. Smart contracts can now call a language model, retrieve web data, conduct private calculations, or schedule future executions as readily as they transfer assets. Developers can deploy standard EVM contracts and immediately access these advanced capabilities without needing specialized new tooling.

Ritual has secured over $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital, backed by advisors such as Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, Tarun Chitra, founder of Gauntlet, and Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX. Archetype led the company's funding round in 2023. Ash Egan, Founder and General Partner of Archetype, commented, "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." Developers can begin deploying on external sites available at docs.ritualfoundation.org, and the network explorer is located at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.

Ritual is defined as a lab dedicated to autonomous intelligence. Its inaugural network, Ritual Chain, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 that allows applications to perform private or scheduled tasks, access external services, and utilize AI models alongside onchain transactions, with computation delegated to trusted hardware and verified onchain. Founded in 2023 by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual has raised over $30M from Archetype and Polychain Capital, and its team includes members from Polychain, DeepMind, a16z crypto, Flashbots, and Palantir. ritual.net The announcement titled "Ritual Launches AI-Native Layer 1 for Autonomous Agents" was first published on CryptoPotato.