New York, United States, October 26th, 2026 - Ritual has launched Ritual Chain, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain engineered to host autonomous AI agents as persistent economic actors that manage identity, private state, and their own wallets.
The network departs from the design of conventional blockchains, which prioritize financial transaction processing, by making model access, private computation and autonomous scheduling first-class features for smart contracts and onchain software. Ritual Chain integrates these capabilities directly into the execution layer so applications can call language models, fetch web data, run confidential workloads and schedule future execution without auxiliary oracles or off-chain tooling.
What Ritual Chain does
Ritual Chain is explicitly oriented toward long-lived AI agents: software instances intended to run for months or years rather than for single interactive sessions. On this network, an agent is independent of the machine or operator that deployed it. It maintains an onchain identity and private state, holds and spends funds from a non-custodial wallet it controls, and can keep sensitive inputs - such as prompts and keys - confidential via trusted execution environments (TEEs).
Key technical characteristics include:
- Native precompiles - 15 built-in precompiles bring LLM inference, web access and autonomous scheduling directly into the protocol so developers working with standard EVM contracts do not need different toolchains to access these features.
- Execute-once, verify-many computation - Ritual introduces an execution and verification architecture that permits heavy compute to be delegated to specialized nodes and then cryptographically verified by the network, avoiding the replicated execution model used by most blockchains.
- Trusted execution environments - Confidential inference and private workloads can run on GPU-backed TEEs that attest to the code executed, keeping sensitive data isolated from the operators of the compute nodes.
- Performance - The network provides sub-300 millisecond block times and, according to Ritual, ranks among the fastest Layer 1 systems available.
Why this matters for agents and developers
Most AI agents today operate within sessions: they execute while a human watches, on third-party infrastructure, and use API keys that can be revoked. That model suffices for chatbots and short-lived automation but falls short for agents that need continuity, direct control of capital, and privacy over multi-month horizons.
Ritual Chain addresses those constraints at the protocol level. An agent’s state and identity persist onchain; scheduled tasks are resumed by the chain’s heartbeat mechanism within the permissions and budget originally granted; and the agent’s economic autonomy comes from direct control of its wallet, enabling it to price services and settle transactions without a human signature.
For confidential activities, TEEs are intended to prevent node operators from observing prompts, keys or strategy data. Continuity is preserved without requiring off-chain cron networks or keeper systems: if an agent stops, the protocol can restart it under the same permissions and budget it was given.
Integrations and pre-launch activity
Ritual Chain enters mainnet with several infrastructure and application partners. Phala Network supplies GPU-backed TEEs for confidential inference, enabling delegated AI work to claim a hardware attestation of what ran. LayerZero provides cross-chain messaging and Stargate supports USDC transfers between Ritual Chain and other networks from day one. Nous Research is bringing an application named Hermes to Ritual Chain.
Ritual also ran a public testnet that has been live since June and which processed over 40 million transactions of both agent and human origin according to the company. The project says its precompiles and execution model allow smart contracts to invoke models, access the web, and schedule future onchain execution as readily as they transfer assets.
Architecture that targets scale
The network’s execute-once, verify-many model is designed to support larger compute workloads - including AI inference - by delegating heavy computation to specialized nodes and using onchain verification to avoid requiring every validator to duplicate the same work. Ritual positions that architecture as a way to enable resource-intensive applications without the inefficiencies of replicated execution.
Funding, team and ecosystem access
Ritual has raised more than $30 million from Archetype and Polychain Capital. Advisors listed include Illia Polosukhin (co-founder of NEAR), Tarun Chitra (founder of Gauntlet) and Arthur Hayes (co-founder of BitMEX). Archetype led Ritual’s 2023 funding round.
The founding team dates to 2023 and includes former Polychain partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti. Ritual’s employee base is described as drawn from Polychain, DeepMind, a16z crypto, Flashbots and Palantir.
Developers can begin deploying to Ritual Chain immediately via external documentation at docs.ritualfoundation.org, and the network explorer operates at explorer.ritualfoundation.org.
Voices from Ritual and its backers
"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.
"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.
How Ritual describes itself
Ritual positions itself as a lab for autonomous intelligence. Its first network, Ritual Chain, is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 where applications can combine AI models, external services, private computation and scheduled work alongside onchain transactions, with delegated computation executed in trusted hardware and verified onchain. The company was founded in 2023 by Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti and reports more than $30 million in funding from Archetype and Polychain Capital.
Contact: Jody Rebak, Ritual - [email protected]
For developers and ecosystem participants, Ritual Chain presents a platform where persistence, economic autonomy and confidential compute are treated as protocol primitives rather than add-ons. Those choices shape developer experience, operational models and the sorts of applications that can run natively onchain without separate off-chain orchestration.