Ritual Chain Launches AI-Native L1, Letting Bots Hold Wallets and Run Their Own Show

New York, United States, October 26th, 2026 — Ritual, a lab for autonomous intelligence founded by former Polychain Capital partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, launched Ritual Chain in a Chainwire announcement. The EVM-compatible Layer 1 is designed for software that can independently use intelligence, control capital, interact with external services and continue operating without constant human intervention.

Ritual Chain gives AI agents persistent onchain identity and state, along with non-custodial wallets they control and use to spend their own funds. Agents can persist independently of the machine or operator that created them, while trusted execution environments keep sensitive prompts and keys confidential from compute operators. AI model access, private computation and autonomous scheduling are native to EVM applications, allowing scheduled work to continue within an agent’s assigned permissions and budget.

The launch follows integrations with Phala Network, Nous Research, LayerZero and Stargate. Ritual Chain’s public testnet, live since June, has processed over 40 million agent- and human-originated transactions. The network delivers sub-300 millisecond block times, placing it among the fastest Layer 1 networks, and includes 15 native precompiles that bring LLM inference, web access and autonomous scheduling directly into the execution layer. Zellic audited the protocol.

Ritual introduced an execution and verification architecture that delegates computationally intensive work to specialized nodes for verification by the network instead of replicating execution across every validator. Its execute-once, verify-many-times model is designed to support larger workloads, including AI inference, without requiring every validator to perform the same computation.