Ritual has officially 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.
Founded by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual aims to move beyond blockchains built primarily for financial transactions. The network provides native AI model access, private computation, and autonomous scheduling for EVM applications. Long-lived agents can persist independently of their creator, manage non-custodial wallets, and keep sensitive prompts and keys confidential via trusted execution environments.
The launch follows a public testnet that has been live since June and processed over 40 million transactions. Ritual Chain delivers sub-300 millisecond block times and includes 15 native precompiles supporting LLM inference, web access, and autonomous scheduling. The protocol has been audited by Zellic and uses an execute-once, verify-many-times architecture, allowing specialized nodes to handle AI workloads without replicating computation across every validator.
Ritual Chain launches with core infrastructure partners: Phala Network provides GPU-backed trusted execution environments for confidential inference, LayerZero serves as cross-chain messaging, and Stargate enables USDC transfers from day one. Nous Research is bringing its Hermes model to the chain. According to Niraj Pant, as intelligence moves toward AGI, it can hold assets, transact, and persist independently, and Ritual provides the infrastructure for those actors.
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. Ash Egan of Archetype said programmable value and programmable intelligence are finally running on the same rails with Ritual mainnet.
