With investments from PayPal and Samsung, how is Kite AI building the blockchain infrastructure for the AI agency economy?

Author: Zen, PANews

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, shopping and payment methods are being reshaped.

In April this year, Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce, leveraging AI to connect the "search to purchase" scenarios, and collaborating with industry leaders like Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Stripe, aiming to achieve personalized and secure AI commerce globally.

Last month, Google announced a new type of AI agent aimed at basic service tasks—its design covers restaurant reservations and will gradually expand to local service appointments and event ticketing.

Today, traditional giants are competing to seize the opportunity to transform AI agents into the next-generation mainstream user interface, extending their reach into the blockchain and cryptocurrency fields. Earlier this month, Kite announced the completion of a $18 million financing round, bringing the total financing to $33 million. The project builds a trust transaction layer for the agent economy, enabling agents to operate independently in trading, coordination, and operations. The platform aims to provide autonomous agents with native access to crypto identities, programmable permissions, and stablecoin payments.

Unlike most Web3 projects, its investors include several heavyweight institutions from traditional industries—led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from Samsung, 8VC, and SBI, among others. So why did so many top institutions choose Kite?

builds a native economic infrastructure for AI agents.

Currently, most autonomous agents are still deployed on centralized platforms, which are designed and optimized around human operations. Although they excel in user convenience, they force agents to rely on sometimes fragile authentication, authorization, and settlement processes, which leads to efficiency bottlenecks and systemic risks.

Theoretically, existing blockchain infrastructure has clear advantages over traditional payment methods, including immutable logs, cryptographic proofs, and replicable smart contract logic. In addition, blockchain-based payments can eliminate intermediaries and enable cross-border micro-payments.

However, traditional blockchains and Web2 are also human user-centric, lacking native identity and trust mechanisms for autonomous intelligent agents. In traditional infrastructure, AI agents often "borrow" the identity of human users to operate, leading to identity fragmentation and security risks (M×N verification maze). Moreover, mainstream public chains process transactions at a discrete pace based on blocks, which is not suitable for continuous agent interactions, and in low-value transactions, transaction fees can be prohibitively high, all of which are detrimental to the high-frequency, low-value microtransactions of AI agents.

This is why Kite creates a dedicated L1 blockchain network, envisioning AI agents as a new category of users in the Web3 ecosystem. It aims to support autonomous agents with programmable trust and AI-compatible capabilities, creating a unified and composable protocol layer for identity, payments, behavior verification, and more. By building a complete set of native economic infrastructure for intelligent agents, agent-based commerce can operate at scale and securely.

The Kite team believes that in the future, the way people interact with the digital world will shift from direct human operation to autonomous AI agents operating on behalf of humans. These agents will search for information, compare prices, place orders, sign contracts, manage subscriptions, etc., becoming the "new user interface." To achieve this, the first step is to structure the data in a verifiable format, and the next step is to create native identity, trust, and programmable payment mechanisms tailored for these agents.

Transforming from an analytics platform, $33 million in funding to build an AI "dream team".

In fact, Kite did not position itself as an autonomous agent infrastructure from the beginning. Kite's predecessor, Zettablock, positioned itself as an "institutional-grade" Web3 indexing and analytics platform, providing large-scale real-time data support for multiple networks such as Sui, Polygon, Chainlink, and EigenLayer.

The rapid development of AI, along with the founding team members' experience and industry background in both blockchain and AI, has led them to see the opportunity to transform into the Web3 AI track.

Chi Zhang, the co-founder and CEO of Kite, holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning/AI (Statistics) and a Master's degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She previously led data engineering product development at Databricks and served as the Chief AI Expert at dotData. The other co-founder, Scott Shi, also serves as Kite's CTO; he built real-time AI infrastructure at Uber and was an early engineer on the Salesforce Einstein AI team.

The two core members collectively hold dozens of AI and blockchain-related patents and top conference papers. Most of the other team members also come from companies like Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, and NEAR, with backgrounds from prestigious universities such as Stanford, MIT, and the University of Tokyo, and they have rich experience in blockchain protocol engineering and big data systems.

At the beginning of this month, Kite announced the completion of a $18 million Series A financing round, led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with other investors including 8VC, Samsung Next, SBI US Gateway Fund, Temasek's venture capital arm Vertex Ventures, Hashed, HashKey, the Avalanche Foundation, LayerZero, Animoca Brands, and others. After this round of financing, Kite's total financing scale has reached $33 million. The funds will be used to expand the smart agent trading platform and enhance the AI agent's ability to conduct large-scale micropayments on-chain using stablecoins.

PayPal Ventures evaluates Kite as "the first infrastructure tailored for the agent economy," pointing out that stablecoins and millisecond-level settlement are key technological gaps in AI agent systems, and Kite has built an important bridge in this regard. In addition, Kite is collaborating with platforms such as PayPal and Shopify and is currently in a pilot phase, allowing merchants to access the agent system through Kite's Agent app store.

Modular Architecture and Kite AIR

The technical architecture of Kite is highly modular, primarily focusing on meeting the needs of AI intelligences. Its base layer is an EVM-compatible Layer-1 chain, and the performance metrics currently displayed on the Kite official website are "1 second average block time, nearly zero fees."

The underlying network operating environment is a customized KiteVM and employs a new consensus mechanism called "Proof of Attributed Intelligence" (PoAI). The PoAI consensus combines Proof of Stake (PoS) with attribution mechanisms, allowing for transparent attribution and rewards for model and data contributions while nodes validate blocks. This means that every agent task, including calling models, providing data, and completing transactions, can leave an auditable record on-chain, ensuring that all parties can fairly receive rewards.

As an infrastructure designed specifically for large-scale, high-frequency AI agents, Kite's architecture prioritizes speed and scalability as core objectives. Its technological foundation is the state channel mechanism: this mechanism supports off-chain streaming micropayments and communication between agents, allowing for near-instant final confirmation. Frequently trading agents can open secure channels, enabling small payments or data exchanges to be completed point-to-point and in real-time, without waiting for block confirmations. Billions of micro-events can be processed off-chain and periodically settled on the main chain, significantly enhancing throughput and drastically reducing costs. Based on this, Kite can support streaming micropayments based on API calls, computation time, or data bytes, meeting the high-frequency billing demands of the agent economy.

In addition, the Kite team has launched a series of tools and modules aimed at developers and agents. The platform has introduced the Kite AIR (Agent Identity Resolution) system, designed to provide agents with secure identity recognition, policy execution, a verifiable record system, and programmable payments executed on Kite's AI-native customized blockchain. The core components of Kite AIR include the KitePass (agent passport) for verifiable identity and policy execution, the Kite Agent App Store for market and service discovery, and the agent integration tools Kite SDK & MCP server.

Among them, KitePass is the intelligent agent identity module designed by Kite: each agent, dataset, or AI model can have a unique encrypted identity identifier, binding the corresponding permissions and reputation information. Through this identity system, agents can use different services without needing to register repeatedly, while their operational history and permission scope can be tracked on-chain. The identity-based programmable governance feature allows agents to have fine-grained automated permission control, such as setting limits on task types and fund usage, ensuring that agents comply with predefined rules during operation.

The Kite Agent App Store is a unified marketplace and service discovery engine for service providers and autonomous agents: service providers can list their offerings and monetize APIs, AI models, data services, or business logic through automated payment processing, while gaining market access, identity-based trust, and usage analytics; for agents and developers, the App Store provides a direct service discovery channel, automatic settlement completed through the Kite settlement channel (with each transaction verifiable on-chain), comprehensive usage record tracking, and a consumption process that interconnects identity, payments, and discovery.

Kite SDK and MCP Server are the toolchains for integrating applications into the Kite identity and settlement infrastructure: Kite SDK is aimed at agent developers, providing tools to build applications with verifiable identity, policy execution, and on-chain settlement capabilities, suitable for creating autonomous agents, agent-driven business applications, cross-platform agent processes, and prototype validation; MCP Server (Model Context Protocol server) is aimed at existing AI applications, enabling any MCP-compatible application to utilize Kite's identity and settlement features, thereby allowing existing chatbots or AI assistants to participate in agent business, opening the entrance to agent capabilities for non-technical users, and bridging traditional AI tools with machine-to-machine economics.

Aero public test upgraded to Ozone, hundreds of millions of calls, tens of millions of users

In February 2025, Kite launched its first public testnet v1, codenamed Aero, on the Avalanche network. The network aims to enhance scalability and data processing capabilities while providing centralized coordination for AI workflows, including data providers, model builders, and autonomous agents. By the end of March, the official data statistics for testnet v1 Aero were released, claiming that since its launch, the network has processed over 546 million AI agent calls, averaging about 11.4 million calls per day, executed approximately 32 million transactions, and connected around 4 million users, of which about 2.4 million are independent AI agent users.

After the exploration of the first phase, in late May this year, Kite AI will upgrade test network Aero to Ozone, positioning it as an Agentic AI interactive portal. The product narrative has shifted from "scalable AI infrastructure" to "the foundational layer supporting the operation of the agent economy." The launch of Ozone further expands the entire Kite AI ecosystem. According to Dune data, as of September 5, the network has processed over 634 million AI agent calls and has onboarded approximately 13.6 million users. In terms of daily active accounts and new additions, it has remained at a high level since mid-August, with an average of 4 million daily active accounts.

In the official announcement of the Series A funding, Kite began to describe its mission as "building the foundational layer of the proxy internet" and stated that its foundational layer powers the entire proxy ecosystem through three main pillars:

• Provide encrypted identity for artificial intelligence models, agents, datasets, and any digital services. Each AI "participant" or "asset" can maintain a unique and verifiable identity to support traceability, provenance, and governance.
• Programmable and fine-grained governance of delegation permissions, usage restrictions, and spending behaviors - managing how AI agents autonomously operate in the "wild".
• Instant proxy payments with near-zero fees enable autonomous systems to discover, negotiate, and pay for services with native access to stablecoins.

PayPal's Head of Cryptocurrency and Digital Asset Global Market Development, Steve Everett, commented on its products, stating that synchronous atomic settlement is achieved through smart contracts, and real-time tracking and auditing across high-performance blockchain protocols are supported. This is a killer combination for programmable payments in the field of AI agent commerce. It opens the door to a truly global automated economy, where people, businesses, and machines can easily and trustfully interact.

Overall, Kite's business model has deepened with the development of the agent economy. Its challenges lie in ecological construction and its own technological iteration, while its advantages stem from early market positioning. Whether it can stand out among numerous AI blockchain projects in the future will depend on whether it can truly solve the trust and settlement issues between agents, thereby providing a reliable foundation for automated economic activities.