New York, United States, October 26, 2026 — Chainwire

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 to turn AI agents into persistent economic actors that control their own wallets, onchain identity, and private state.

Unlike conventional blockchains designed primarily to execute financial transactions, Ritual Chain is built to support software that can independently use intelligence, control capital, interact with external services, and continue operating without constant human intervention. AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling are native capabilities for EVM applications on the network, making the rationale for a dedicated chain clearer while preserving its technical differentiation. The labels carry weight here: EVM compatibility means smart contracts written for Ethereum deploy with existing tooling, while the Layer 1 designation marks Ritual as its own base network rather than a scaling layer atop another chain.

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 that has been live since June and has processed over 40 million transactions from both agent- and human-originated activity. Ritual Chain delivers sub-300 millisecond block times, placing it among the fastest Layer 1 networks in the industry, and includes 15 native precompiles — protocol-level functions implemented natively rather than as contract code, a mechanism Ethereum also uses for core operations — that bring capabilities such as LLM inference, web access, and autonomous scheduling directly into the execution layer. The protocol has been audited by Zellic, a blockchain security firm.

Ritual also introduces a new execution and verification architecture that allows computationally intensive work to be delegated to specialized nodes and verified by the network, avoiding the replicated execution required by most blockchains. This execute-once, verify-many-times model enables the network to support far larger workloads, including AI inference, without requiring every validator to perform the same computation.

Long-Horizon Agents Require Dedicated Blockchain 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 is fine for a chat, but it does not work for an agent meant to manage its own treasury, run a recurring paid service, or coordinate with other agents over long periods. The distinction has sharpened as AI systems have shifted from answering questions to multi-step work: general-purpose blockchains can move money but have no native way to run or verify AI computation, while conventional cloud platforms can run AI but give software no protocol-level way to own capital or outlast a provider's policies.

A long-lived agent needs continuity that does not depend on its creator, capital it actually controls, privacy from the machines it runs on. On Ritual Chain, an agent's state and identity are held onchain, its scheduled work continues within the permissions and budget it was given, and its sensitive inputs can be processed inside trusted execution environments designed to shield them from node operators.

Continuity is handled at the protocol level. 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 is required, and an agent's 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 without a human signer in the loop. For confidential workloads, trusted execution environments are designed to 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. 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," said Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual.

Ritual Chain Launches With Core Infrastructure Partners

Ritual Chain launches with its core infrastructure partners 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 — the same class of hardware isolation long used to secure mobile payments. LayerZero serves as the network's cross-chain messaging layer, with Stargate enabling USDC, the dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, to move between Ritual Chain and other networks from day one — a practical detail for agent economics, since agents on the chain price their own services and settle their own transactions. 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. 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. Developers deploy standard EVM contracts and gain those capabilities without new tooling.

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. When we led the round in 2023, a chain that could execute agentic and autonomous work natively did not exist. Today it does," said Ash Egan, Founder and General Partner of Archetype.

Developers can deploy from day one, with documentation hosted at docs.ritualfoundation.org and the network explorer at explorer.ritualfoundation.org. With mainnet live, the explorer doubles as a public record of how the chain is used — deployments, transfers, and inference-calling contracts all leave onchain traces — offering developers and observers a direct view of network activity as it develops.

About Ritual

Ritual is a lab for autonomous intelligence. Its first network, Ritual Chain, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 where applications can use AI models, access external services, and carry out private or scheduled work alongside onchain transactions, with delegated computation executed in trusted hardware and verified onchain. Founded in 2023 by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual has raised more than $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital, with a team drawn from Polychain, DeepMind, a16z crypto, Flashbots, and Palantir.

More information is available at ritual.net. Media contact: Jody Rebak, Ritual, jody@ritual.net.