New York, United States, October 26th, 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 designed to turn AI agents into persistent economic actors that control their own wallets, onchain identity, and private state.

Unlike conventional blockchains built 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. The network makes AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling native capabilities for EVM applications, sharpening the rationale for a new chain while preserving its technical differentiation.

The most visible demonstration of that combination is the long-lived AI agent — software 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. Together, these characteristics target software that conventional blockchains were not designed to host.

The network launches with integrations to Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero, and Stargate, following a public testnet that has been live since June — a pre-launch phase builders use to stress-test software under real conditions before value is at stake — and that has processed more than 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 — built-in functions that contracts call like standard 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.

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. According to the company, 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.

Longorizon 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 chatbot. 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. A long-lived agent needs continuity that does not depend on its creator, capital it actually controls, and 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 rather than by external dependencies. 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 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. LayerZero serves as the network's cross-chain messaging layer, with Stargate enabling USDC, a widely used dollar-pegged stablecoin, 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. 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.

Because the testnet counted transactions from both agent- and human-originated activity, the balance between the two on the live network offers an observable measure of how much usage comes from autonomous software rather than people.

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 funding 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 a network explorer available at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.

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 (Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm), Flashbots, and Palantir. More information is available at ritual.net. Media contact: Jody Rebak, jody@ritual.net.