AI infra on‑chain: Ritual
New blockchain AI infrastructure projects like Ritual are positioning developers to build autonomous finance, analytics dApps, and AI governance layers — the pitch: on‑chain agents that execute finance logic and governance without centralized servers. Backers say this will enable new classes of autonomous DeFi products and on‑chain analytics. (x.com)
Ritual closed a reported $25 million Series A led by Archetype with strategic participation from Polychain, according to a January 2025 report that also outlined early team composition and investor backing. (cuckoo.network) Ritual’s first product, Infernet, is described by the project as a decentralized oracle/agent network that lets smart contracts call AI models both on‑chain and off‑chain, while the next phase is a purpose‑built Ritual Chain L1 designed for “AI‑native” execution. (ritual.net) The protocol advertises “enshrined on‑chain AI models” as first‑class blockchain objects with primitives for provenance, privacy and modular computational integrity — features the docs say enable atomic smart‑contract interactions with models. (ritualfoundation.org) Ritual materials and coverage note support plans for trusted execution environments and verifiable compute (including zk approaches) to attest model execution, and position those primitives as the basis for on‑chain agent logic such as automated risk management in DeFi. (ritualfoundation.org) Public-facing infrastructure is currently operating in private testnet stages while Ritual has publicly discussed mainnet ambitions for 2025; the project’s GitHub and community repos host TypeScript docs, RAG data‑pipeline templates and other developer tooling. (stakingcabin.com)
