What is Kite AI? PayPal led a $18 million investment to build three key infrastructures for AI Agent.

Kite AI is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain specifically built to provide infrastructure for AI Agents and the Internet of Intelligent Agents. In 2024, Kite AI completed a $18 million Series A funding round led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, bringing the total funding to $33 million.

What is Kite AI? Redefining the AI Agent Economy

Kite AI is a decentralized ecosystem built on a customizable blockchain platform, with the mission of creating a fair artificial intelligence economy where everyone can contribute and receive corresponding rewards. Kite AI is not manipulated by tech giants monopolizing data and controlling artificial intelligence models, but rather redefines the way value is distributed through the Proof of Attributed Intelligence (PoAI) consensus mechanism.

In an era where artificial intelligence is gradually changing all aspects of life, establishing a fair, transparent, and decentralized AI ecosystem is unprecedented. Kite AI provides a brand new approach that combines the power of blockchain with the modern artificial intelligence economy. This is a groundbreaking method that clarifies participants' recognition of contributions, such as data providers, model builders, and those who create AI agents.

Kite AI is designed on an EVM-compatible Layer 1, not just an ordinary blockchain, but also a pillar of the entire decentralized artificial intelligence infrastructure, capable of: infinite scalability, flexible customization, rapid integration with AI smart contracts, and effectively coordinating various AI tasks through dedicated subnets.

The team members come from top universities such as the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and well-known tech companies like Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, JPMorgan Chase, and BlockFi. Co-founder and CEO Zhang Chi was previously a product manager at Databricks, co-founder of the leading AutoML platform dotData, a former researcher at Gilead Sciences, and holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Co-founder and CTO Scott Shi was the creator of Uber’s safety data system and a founding engineer of Salesforce Einstein AI, holding multiple AI patents.

Three Core Infrastructures of the AI Agent Economy

Kite AI mainly addresses three core challenges in the AI Agent economy, and these infrastructures are the key pillars for the operation of the agent internet.

In the traditional internet, each application has its own account system, and users need to register repeatedly on different platforms. For AI Agents, this model is even more complex and inefficient. Kite provides a cryptography-based identity authentication system that gives each AI model, agent, dataset, and digital service a unique and verifiable identity.

Three Core Features of Identity System:

Portability: Intelligent agents can log into any application with the same identity, just like we log into various websites with our Gmail account.

Interoperability: Smart agents can interact with any service without the need for repeated registration.

Reputation-based System: Intelligent agents have their own ID and reputation records, and can share the reputation of their owners through provable lineage.

This identity system solves the trust issues of AI Agents when collaborating across platforms. When an agent has built a good reputation on multiple platforms, this reputation can be carried over to new platforms without the need to establish trust from scratch.

Native Governance Mechanism of Intelligent Entities

The programmable governance system of Kite allows developers to set programmable permission controls for intelligent agents, including usage constraints, spending limits, and more. For example, you can authorize a shopping agent to spend a maximum of $500 per month, only on specific e-commerce platforms for purchasing daily necessities, and with a single transaction not exceeding $100. This authorization control ensures that the intelligent agent does not exceed the preset boundaries while operating autonomously.

Programmable governance resolves the contradiction between the autonomy and safety of AI agents. On one hand, we want intelligent agents to be able to make autonomous decisions and take actions to improve efficiency. On the other hand, completely unrestricted agents may cause losses or abuse. Kite's governance mechanism finds a balance between the two, allowing users to flexibly set permission boundaries according to their needs.

Native Payment System for Intelligent Bodies

Traditional payment systems are too complex and expensive for microtransactions between machines. Kite offers an instant, stablecoin-based settlement system that is specifically optimized for machine-to-machine microtransaction scenarios. The system's gas fees are below $0.000001, which is almost negligible, with an average block time of just 1 second, enabling large-scale agent transactions.

This ultra-low-cost payment system is key to the AI Agent economy. Imagine an agent needing to make thousands of small transactions every day—querying data, calling APIs, purchasing services, etc. If each transaction incurs a Gas fee of $0.1, the costs would become prohibitive. Kite's fee of $0.000001 makes these micropayments economically viable.

PoAI Consensus Mechanism: Fair Distribution of AI Value

PoAI is the core innovation of Kite AI. PoAI not only verifies transactions like a conventional blockchain but also proves contributions to intellectual value, including efforts in data processing, model training, and AI agent creation. This opens up a fair and transparent reward system where everyone can receive value corresponding to their actual contributions.

The decentralized data access engine is a powerful decentralized data governance tool that helps to: protect privacy and data ownership, identify data contributions in a verifiable manner, and ensure fair and transparent data reward distribution. The programmable AI value chain allows developers to: create specialized AI subnetworks optimized for each use case, establish seamless connections between data models and AI agents, and automate the process of evaluating and distributing profits among components.

Decentralized and portable AI memory systems help to: manage training history and transparently use AI, ensuring that the ownership and origin of models are not obscured or stolen.

Kite AIR: The Application Store of the Smart Economy

Kite AIR is the core application of the entire ecosystem, which can be understood as the App Store of the intelligent agent world. Users can discover various functional agents on the platform, ranging from daily shopping, food ordering, and ride-hailing to more complex financial transactions and data analysis. For developers, Kite AIR provides a complete development toolchain, and the platform offers detailed tutorials and sample code.

Currently, Kite has over 100 functional modules, 17.8 million intelligent agent passports, with a daily peak interaction volume of 1.01 million times, and a cumulative interaction volume exceeding 1.7 billion times. These data indicate that Kite AI has established an active ecosystem. Kite has formed strategic partnerships with multiple projects, Pi Squared provides high-performance settlement infrastructure for Kite, Vishwa deploys intelligent agent liquidity strategies on Kite, Irys offers data layer support, and Masa provides real-time data services for social intelligent agents.

The era of the internet is coming, and Kite is laying the most important infrastructure for this new era. From near-zero transaction costs to programmable governance mechanisms, from cryptographic identity verification to native stablecoin payments, Kite is turning the sci-fi-like intelligent economy into reality.