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Ritual, a lab for autonomous intelligence founded by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, has launched Ritual Chain — an EVM-compatible Layer 1 built for a new kind of software.
Unlike conventional blockchains designed primarily to execute financial transactions, Ritual Chain supports software that can independently use intelligence, control capital, interact with external services, and keep operating without constant human intervention. The network makes AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling native capabilities for EVM applications.
Agents as Persistent Economic Actors
The most visible demonstration of that combination is long-lived AI agents — the kind designed to operate for months or years rather 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 own non-custodial wallet, and can keep sensitive prompts and keys confidential from compute operators through trusted execution environments.
The network launches with integrations to Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero, and Stargate, following a public testnet live since June that has processed over 40 million transactions—both agent- and human-originated. Ritual Chain delivers sub-300 millisecond block times, placing it among the fastest Layer 1 networks in the industry, and includes 15 native precompiles that bring capabilities like LLM inference, web access, and autonomous scheduling directly into the execution layer. Zellic has audited the protocol.
 
At its core, Ritual introduces a new execution and verification architecture that delegates computationally intensive work to specialized nodes and verifies it across the network — avoiding the replicated execution most blockchains require. This execute-once, verify-many-times model lets the network support far larger workloads, including AI inference, without requiring every validator to perform the same computation.
Why Long-Horizon Agents Need Dedicated Infrastructure
Most AI agents today live inside a session: they run while a human is watching, on infrastructure someone else controls, with an API key that can be revoked at any time. That’s fine for a chatbot. It doesn’t work for an agent meant to manage its own treasury, run a recurring paid service, or coordinate with other agents over long periods.
A long-lived agent needs three things: continuity that doesn’t depend on its creator, capital it actually controls, and privacy from the machines it runs on. Ritual Chain provides all three.
The protocol handles continuity. If an agent stops, the chain’s heartbeat mechanism can restart it within the permissions and budget it was given — no keeper network or off-chain cron job required — and its state and identity survive beyond its deployer’s involvement. Economic autonomy comes from agent-controlled wallets: an agent controls its own funds, prices its own services, and settles its own transactions with no human signer in the loop. And for confidential workloads, trusted execution environments isolate an agent’s sensitive prompts, keys, and strategy data from the node operators running its compute.
“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,” said Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual. “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.”
Core Infrastructure Partners at Launch
Ritual Chain launches with its core partners already in place. Phala Network provides 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 as the cross-chain messaging layer, with Stargate enabling USDC to move between Ritual Chain and other networks from day one. On the application side, Nous Research is bringing Hermes to Ritual Chain.
Unlike chains that add AI access through external oracles, Ritual Chain makes AI execution part of the protocol itself. Smart contracts can call a language model, fetch data from the web, run private computation, or schedule their own future execution as directly as they transfer assets — and developers deploy standard EVM contracts to gain those capabilities, with no new tooling required.
Backed by Archetype and Polychain
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. Archetype led the company’s 2023 round.
“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,” said Ash Egan, Founder and General Partner of Archetype. “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 deploy from day one, with documentation at docs.ritualfoundation.org and the network explorer at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.
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