I've always thought that the idea of blockchain being decentralized and self-controlled sounds pretty cool. Managing your own wallet, holding your own private keys, making your own transactions—it's all up to the individual. Even if automated tools are used, they are just assisting the person; ultimately, it's still the person making the decisions behind the scenes.
But now, things are a bit different. AI is no longer just a tool; it has started to become agents that can think for themselves, plan for themselves, and work independently. At this point, the old assumption that everything is ultimately controlled by humans begins to waver. If AI agents want to navigate the digital world on their own, they need to be able to pay, sign contracts, and coordinate with other entities without having to wait for human confirmation every time they make a move.
Kite AI was born precisely to address this pain point. It does not merely pursue faster DeFi or lower fees, but asks a more profound question: what will the crypto world look like when intelligence itself requires economic rights?
Many people discuss AI and blockchain, often revolving around computing markets, data sources, or model ownership. These are important, but they overlook the most critical point: intelligence without economic autonomy is still fundamentally constrained by humans. If an AI agent requires human authorization for every payment, how can it claim true autonomy? It cannot negotiate in real-time, optimize over time, nor operate at machine speed.
Kite starts from the basics, believing that the future online will be crowded with agents that are constantly in motion, and what they need is cryptographic-level security assurances, rather than a procedural approval signature.
Currently, many chains simplify matters by packing identity and permissions all into a single wallet. This may work for us humans, as we have off-chain memory and a sense of responsibility to back it up. But machines do not.
Kite has established a three-tier identity model: user, agent, session. Users set the rules, agents operate within the defined boundaries, and sessions ensure permissions can be revoked at any time. This way, AI agents can trade within a secure framework without being permanently tied to the purse strings. It feels like the risk control from traditional finance has been truly transferred onto the blockchain for the first time, and designed specifically for machines.
Kite chooses to build an EVM-compatible Layer 1 chain, which may seem conservative but is actually very smart. The agent economy does not need a brand new virtual machine; it needs stable execution and high composability. EVM compatibility allows Kite to seamlessly integrate with the existing ecosystem, not starting from scratch, but expanding the world of existing smart contracts. What changes is not what contracts can do, but who can invoke them and under what conditions.
Additionally, Kite places a special emphasis on using stablecoins for real-time payments. I strongly agree with this. Speculation can tolerate volatile prices, but automation cannot. An agent needs to budget, arbitrage, and purchase services, and the unit of account it uses cannot fluctuate wildly from one day to the next.
Kite treats stablecoins as the core settlement tool, suggesting that the future on-chain economy may gradually shift from betting on price fluctuations to continuous service exchange: agents pay for data, rent computational power, or settle results for other agents. Without a stable measure of value, these things will be hard to scale.
This also exposes a blind spot in the current DeFi: too many optimizations are chasing capital efficiency during speculative times, while neglecting the efficiency needed for continuous operation. Kite is designed to support low fee, gasless interactions and high-frequency microtransactions, not to please users, but to enable machines to operate unsupervised. It is more like infrastructure tailored for a new economic entity, the AI agent.
The design of the KITE token reflects this long-term thinking. Early stages focus on incentivizing behavioral guidance and ecological expansion, with later stages gradually introducing staking, governance, and revenue sharing. Because the agent economy cannot be built overnight. Future governance will be interesting: if agents act on behalf of users, voting will no longer be simple voting but strategic delegation. Who decides what agents can vote on? How can permissions be revoked? Kite has not fully answered these questions, but it has paved the way for them.
Currently, the internet is shifting from static products to continuous services, from single interactions to persistent processes. AI has made decision-making cheap and commonplace, while blockchain provides permissionless value transfer. What is missing is the bridge that securely combines the two. Kite attempts to fill this gap through identity separation and programmable permissions, pointing to a future where economic power belongs not only to people but also to intelligent processes.
Of course, risks cannot be ignored. Agency systems may amplify errors, governance can trigger chain reactions if it goes awry, and regulation is not yet prepared to face non-human entities. Kite's architecture attempts to mitigate some issues through clear and revocable permissions, but uncertainty certainly remains; this is perhaps the price of venturing into new territory.
Ultimately, what Kite is betting on is not how smart AI can be, but that future economic coordination will become the biggest bottleneck. Intelligence will become increasingly common, and the key questions are who pays, under what rules, and how accountability is enforced. If constraints are not built into the protocol layer, then outside parties (such as platforms or regulators) will force their rules upon it. Cryptocurrencies have proven over ten years that code can transfer value permissionlessly; the next decade will test whether code can transfer value with judgement.
Kite's approach is to turn this judgment into boundaries that are enforced in the cryptographic protocol, rather than relying on human intuition in the moment. Intelligence has arrived; what it lacks is a wallet of its own. Kite is attempting to provide this answer.
