If you compare the AI track of the 2025 crypto market to a Hollywood blockbuster with special effects, then the vast majority of AI concept coins are at best just those temporary actors who flail in front of a green screen, relying on cheap effects for post-production. Kite, on the other hand, is more like the film negatives and camera that support the entire filming of the movie—without it, there would be nothing but emptiness on the screen.
Looking back from the point of December 2025, the AI concept has undergone three rounds of brutal defoaming. Those projects that once clamored for 'decentralized computing power' and 'AI agent automated trading' have fallen to just a fraction of their original highs under the hammer of real user retention and model inference costs. I am bearish on most AI concept coins because they essentially only have a pretty shell called 'Web3' layered over OpenAI's API interface, lacking soul and even more so, a moat.
But I dare not short Kite; even during every irrational market downturn, I examine whether my position still has room.
Why? Because Kite addresses the core 'black box trust' issue at the intersection of AI and Web3. If most AI tokens are 'repeaters' in the digital world, then Kite is the 'digital grand judge' that establishes the grammatical logic and supervises whether the repeaters are lying.
From a technical depth perspective, Kite's macro architecture is not just simple 'computing power leasing,' but a complete set of verification logic networks. By 2025, the authenticity verification of model inference (ZKML) has become a necessity. When you let an AI agent manage your ETH assets, what you worry about most is not whether it is smart, but whether it truly executes the preset algorithms or if the developers secretly changed the logic in the background. Kite, through its unique proof mechanism, ensures that every inference made by AI has traceability, and this 'transparent intelligence' is a technical barrier that most projects in the current market cannot reach.
From a data perspective, as of Q4 2025, the number of active on-chain developers for Kite has maintained a month-on-month growth of 35%, which is simply a miracle in the current liquidity tightening. Even more noteworthy is its token economic model. Unlike those projects with total supplies in the hundreds of billions and indefinite lock-up periods, Kite’s value capture logic is extremely hardcore: any AI agent that calls its verification network must consume Kite as 'trust fuel.' This deflationary mechanism is not just a vision written on a PPT; it is genuinely reflected in the real-time status of data destruction on-chain.
The reason I dare not short it is due to a deeper industry insight: Kite is evolving from a tool into a 'gravity center' of an ecosystem. The mainstream L2s and some L1s in the market are now trying to connect to Kite's API to enhance the security of AI applications within their ecosystems. When a project goes from 'participating in competition' to 'setting standards,' shorting it is equivalent to betting that the entire process of human civilization evolving towards intelligence will suddenly halt.
For ordinary investors, I recommend paying attention to Kite's integration progress with leading public chains in the next three months. If the staking amount (TVL) of its verification nodes breaks through a critical resistance level, then this wave of price increase will no longer be emotion-driven but a true value reassessment. Compared to betting on those 'AI shell protocols' that may run away at any time, observing Kite's node return rates and network latency data is a much more practical action.
In the crypto world, our instinct is to be bearish on mediocrity, but respecting true innovation is the bottom line for our survival. At this year-end and new year's time, amidst the flying AI bubbles, holding onto those projects that have truly taken root is far wiser than searching for the next rainbow flag amidst the ruins.
This article is an independent personal analysis and does not constitute investment advice.
