KITE AI

Kite Mainnet is now live. This is not just another mainnet. It is the first blockchain built for agentic payments. Designed for an agent-first internet, for builders, and for the future Agent Economy. What makes Kite Mainnet different: Built for builders and agents. Not chasing TVL. Not chasing the next DeFi cycle. Not competing for idle speculative capital. Three layers, one platform: • Settlement Layer: built for high-frequency, low-value, agent-driven stablecoin-native transactions. • Kite Agent Passport: unifies identity, delegated authority, and programmable governance. • Agent Interface & Experience: where agents and developers interact with the system through agent registration, agent harnesses, and service discovery. A unified hub for all major payment protocol standards, including x402, Google AP2, and Stripe MPP. Try Kite Agent Passport today: agentpassport.ai Join our agentic community: discord.gg/gokiteai Let's build the rails for the Agent Economy.

Today, Kite is excited to share our collaboration with Proof of Japan, the joint venture established by SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. and Hatapro, on Flattora, an AI travel assistant powered by ZUKKU. Together, we are demonstrating how AI Agents can help travelers discover, book, and pay for local Japanese experiences within user-defined spending rules, while Kite Agent Passport provides programmable wallet sessions, verifiable receipts, and safer payment infrastructure for agentic commerce. Read the full article above⬆️

From near-autonomous AI chemists improving drug reactions to million-token models built for agentic coding, the last two weeks show agentic AI is maturing from a digital assistant into a hands-on force across science, hardware, and the enterprise. Here's your biweekly recap of everything that happened in the space, in the latest edition of AI Agents Pulse: 1️⃣ Midjourney unveils "The Midjourney Scanner," an ultrasound-based full-body scanner built with Butterfly Network, aiming to deliver MRI-quality preventative imaging in a 60-second scan. theverge.com/ai-artificial-… 2️⃣ Adobe launches a public beta of bespoke AI assistants for Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator, automating in-app tasks like layer organization and timeline edits through natural-language prompts. theverge.com/tech/952099/ad… 3️⃣ Google commits $1.5 billion to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama through 2027, including a $2 million fund for local energy-efficiency programs. blog.google/innovation-and… 4️⃣ DeepSeek raises $7.4 billion in fresh funding, while Z.ai launches GLM-5.2, a model with a 1 million-token context window and reasoning controls aimed at agentic software engineering. tldr.tech/ai/2026-06-17 5️⃣ ChatGPT's market share falls below 50% for the first time as users migrate to Gemini, Claude, and Grok, though it remains the most-used AI assistant with over a billion monthly users. tldr.tech/ai/2026-06-18 6️⃣ The UK government plans to deploy facial age-estimation AI to check asylum seekers' ages at the border, despite internal reports warning the tech frequently mistakes children for adults. wired.com/story/facial-a… 7️⃣ Snap debuts "Specs," $2,200 AR glasses positioned as wearable computers; its stock fell over 5% as investors questioned the price for Snap's core demographic. techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/aft… 8️⃣ OpenAI and Molecule.one demonstrate a near-autonomous AI chemist powered by GPT-5.4 that improved a challenging drug-making reaction, a notable step for medicinal chemistry. openai.com/index/ai-chemi… 9️⃣ Meta rolls out "AI Mode" on Facebook, answering questions grounded in public Group and Reel content, alongside new AI tools to edit photos and generate stylized video. about.fb.com/news/2026/06/n… 🔟 Yann LeCun brands Elon Musk's xAI a "failure" after several co-founders departed, and the "godfather of AI" warned of a potential "big bubble explosion" in the industry. cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yan…

Autonomous agents need more than payment rails. They need trust, compliance, and risk intelligence built into the transaction layer. We’re excited to share that @CrystalPlatform is bringing blockchain compliance to @GoKiteAI’s agent economy through Crystal Expert, integrated into Kite’s agentic payment infrastructure. This collaboration helps strengthen: ▷ real-time transaction monitoring for agentic payment flows ▷ sanctions screening and wallet risk intelligence ▷ enterprise-ready infrastructure for autonomous agents to transact with more confidence As agents move from copilots to economic actors, compliance becomes part of the core stack for agentic commerce. Read the full PR: coinmarketcap.com/community/arti…

The Agentic Economy: Payments, Commerce & AI-Native Platforms brought together some of the sharpest builders, investors, and operators in San Francisco to get real about what it actually takes for agentic payments to work at scale. The conversation was electric. Huge thanks to EntreConnect, Kite, and AWS for co-hosting, and to our incredible panel: ▷ @kleffew94, GTM Lead at @coinbase ▷ @gaganmac, VP Product Management at @circle ▷ @ChiZhangData, Co-Founder & CEO at @GoKiteAI ▷ @alanxdu, Partner at @M12vc A few themes stood out from the discussion: 1️⃣ Trust is the real unlock. The hard part is not getting agents to spend. It is making humans comfortable letting agents act and spend on their behalf. Every transaction needs clear authorization, spending boundaries, and a path for review. 2️⃣ Agent identity needs continuity. Credit and trust assume a stable subject, but agents can change as models, context, and runtime environments change. The “same agent” may be defined less by fixed credentials and more by continuity of behavior over time. 3️⃣ Wallets can become memory. A recurring idea from the panel was that credit is trust, and trust is built on memory. For agents, wallets can carry transaction history and make behavior legible, creating a foundation for reputation and credit. 4️⃣ Money is becoming a governance interface. Money is not just what agents use to transact. Spending limits, permissions, and economic consequences become concrete ways to align agent behavior with human intent. Programmable money is a control surface for autonomous systems. 5️⃣ Enterprise workflows may come before consumer shopping. Consumer agentic commerce will matter, but near-term adoption may start with agents paying for APIs, cloud resources, models, compute, and other metered services inside predefined governance rules. 6️⃣ Agents will change how markets process information. Agents can ingest more information, compare options faster, and execute decisions more quickly than humans. As agents become economic actors, markets will need infrastructure that supports speed, accountability, identity, and settlement at once. Agentic commerce becomes real when autonomous agents can act, pay, and be held accountable. 🪁

$KITE is now live on @HyperliquidX Spot. Trade KITE/USDC on Hyperliquid.

The agent economy is a team sport. This summer, two associates are joining Kite to help build the infrastructure for autonomous agents: ▷ Jenna Chiang, an M.S. Data Science candidate at Northeastern University, joins our data team. Across internships at ClinAlytix, BOXS, and Gamania, she has built ETL pipelines, semantic search layers, and learning-to-rank systems, turning messy data into something agents can actually use. ▷ James Takami, an MBA candidate at UC Berkeley Haas and a SkyDeck Venture Fellow, joins our strategy and BD team. As former Director of Strategic Finance at Coin Metrics (acquired by Talos), he has spent years close to stablecoins, agentic payments, and tokenization. Welcome to the team! 🪁

Kite is advancing agentic commerce through global conversations on sovereign finance, practical ecosystem partnerships, and community-driven building. Here's what we delivered this week: 1️⃣ AI on AIR Ep.17 launched with @hashed_official Open Finance CEO @harryhojinkim, exploring why Korea may become a critical testbed for AI agents, KRW stablecoins, and regulated financial rails. 2️⃣ Our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData joined @BlockHashPod Ep.742 to explain why Kite’s adoption thesis flipped within a year — from consumer demos like ordering Uber to the API economy, where agents pay for services by the call, and the adoption order is developers, enterprises, then consumers. 3️⃣ We announced that Chi will join @circle, @coinbase, and @M12vc for a San Francisco panel on June 15, diving into the practical infrastructure questions of the agentic economy. 4️⃣ We partnered with @DatalineAI as a Launch Partner, pairing Dataline’s upstream structured data (spot, perp funding, prediction markets) with Kite Chain’s sub-second settlement to strengthen the Data → Decision → Settle loop for autonomous agents. 5️⃣ We published a concept demo that explores how the Kite Agent Passport could enable a CS2 skin purchase: an agent monitors the market and pays only if a quote stays under $45, without ever exposing Steam credentials — bound by a 20-minute window, a hard cap, and full onchain proof. 6️⃣ We continued the Kite Community Growth Plan with an AI sharing session by our community member, breaking down the arc from AI that answers questions to AI that executes real-world actions and the trust layer that makes it possible. 7️⃣ We launched the Kite Mainnet Use Case Sharing Session, a weekly community program every Wednesday in Discord where builders present real mainnet builds and earn recognition. The rails for the autonomous economy are being built through real conversations and community action. 🪁

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/PLU5Jumn1kc?si…

Korea’s crypto market is not moving as one block. In Episode 17 of AI on AIR, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData sat down with @harryhojinkim, CEO of @hashed_official Open Finance, to explore why Korea may become one of the most important testbeds for AI agents, stablecoins, and regulated financial infrastructure. In this clip, they unpack one key split inside Korea’s institutional market: ▷ Brokerages and securities firms are moving faster: they already see crypto as an investment instrument, and exchanges as brokerages for tokenized assets. ▷ Banks, credit card companies and payment institutions are more cautious: payments, settlement and lending depend on clearer regulation, and Korea’s Bank Act is much more sensitive. ▷ Regulation may become the turning point: the Digital Asset Basic Act, KRW stablecoin licenses, and financial institutions moving into Upbit all point to a market that is still early, but opening up. For agent finance to reach local markets, trading volume is only one signal. Institutional trust, regulatory clarity and verifiable financial rails matter just as much. 🪁

Agentic commerce moves from theory to infrastructure when payments, identity, and platforms meet in the same room. 📍 San Francisco 🗓️ June 15, 5:00-8:00 PM PDT Our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData will join a practical conversation on The Agentic Economy: Payments, Commerce & AI-Native Platforms. 🎙️ Speakers: ▷ Gagan Mac @gaganmac, VP Product Management at @circle ▷ Chi Zhang @ChiZhangData, Co-Founder & CEO at @GoKiteAI ▷ Kevin Leffew @kleffew94, GTM Lead at @coinbase ▷ Alan Du @alanxdu, Partner at @M12vc Hosts: EntreConnect, Kite, and AWS Builder Loft. The conversation will unpack: ▷ What is real in the agent economy today, and what is still hype? ▷ How will AI agents discover, evaluate, and complete purchases for users? ▷ What payment rails, identity layers, and trust mechanisms are needed for agent-driven transactions at scale? If you are building agents, payments, commerce infrastructure, or AI-native platforms, this is the room to be in. Register here: luma.com/25ppb812 Agentic commerce needs verifiable identity, programmable governance, and native stablecoin settlement. 🪁

Full episode: youtu.be/se1HXCqNC7E 🪁

The agent economy will not start with shopping. It starts with APIs. On Episode 742 of the @BlockHashPod, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData sat down with host Brandon Zemp to unpack why Kite's adoption thesis flipped within one year: ▷ Our first demo was agents ordering Uber Eats. Today the nearest-term use case is the API economy: agents paying per call, in real time, for the services they consume ▷ If the world ends up with more agents than humans, the whole world needs to be API accessible. That is how agents work with each other ▷ Adoption will run from developers to enterprises to consumers. Exactly the opposite of what we expected a year ago

AI on Air Ep.17: Hashed on Korea’s Agent Finance Moment x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Sovereign agent finance starts with local money, compliance, and trust. As AI agents move from copilots to economic actors, the harder questions arrive: What financial rails do agents need? How should KRW stablecoins, identity, and compliance work in a local market? And what does machine-native payment infrastructure look like in practice? Join us for Episode 17 of AI on AIR podcast with @hashed_official’s @harryhojinkim, CEO of Hashed Open Finance. Our founders @ChiZhangData and @scottshics will sit down with Hojin to explore Korea’s role in shaping sovereign agent finance, from KRW stablecoins and regulated financial rails to machine payments and institutional trust. 📍 Live on Kite’s X and LinkedIn 📅 June 10 🕐 19:00 PST 📌 Sovereign Agent Finance: KRW Stablecoins, Compliance, and Machine Payments We’ll discuss: • Why KRW stablecoin infrastructure matters for AI agents • What Korea’s payment, banking, and regulatory environment makes possible • How compliance and identity need to evolve for agent wallets • Where machine-native payments and x402-style flows fit • Why institutional trust is core to the agent economy Set your reminder and join us live. Before agents can transact at scale, they need sovereign, compliant, and verifiable financial rails. 🪁

@claudeai The "Mythos-class" framing is telling. Anthropic is signaling capability tiers that outpace consumer-grade benchmarks entirely. 👀

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

#CS2 skin markets make the trust problem in agentic commerce easy to see. In this concept demo, @GoKiteAI shows how Agent Passport lets a player ask an agent to watch the CS2 skin market and buy only if an approved quote stays under $45, without handing over Steam account control. ▷ Scope the task: one CS2 weapon skin, approved marketplace rails, USDC via x402, 20-minute window, $45 hard cap. ▷ Keep account control with the player: no Steam password, Steam Guard, session cookie, trade approval, wallet seed, or card-on-file. ▷ Prove every step: quote check, bounded payment, blocked attempts, receipt, and automatic revocation. Delegate the payment, not the keys. 🪁

Kite is accelerating the transition to an agent-first economy by establishing the infrastructure for secure, verifiable, and autonomous commerce. Here is what we delivered this week: 1️⃣ Our Head of Ecosystem @Henryleemr introduced the Kite Agent Passport at #BitcoinSeoul2026, connecting with global institutions to define the next generation of machine-native payment rails. 2️⃣ Our Co-Founder and CEO @ChiZhangData joined @proofoftalk at the Louvre to lead a panel on "Personhood, Provenance, and Verification," exploring how decentralized identity secures interactions in the agentic age. 3️⃣ Our VP & Head of BD @lei_lei0904 joined the @csuitepodcast at Consensus to discuss the trust requirements of agentic commerce, highlighting that the x402 payment extension has now facilitated over 100 million transactions. 4️⃣ We outlined a vision for how the Kite Agent Passport enables autonomous trading on platforms like Polymarket, allowing agents to execute signal-based trades within strict, user-defined policy bounds without ever holding a hot wallet. 5️⃣ We joined @billions_ntwk as a launch partner for their collaborative AI agentic movie, supporting 500+ builders using the x402 payment extension to turn agents into filmmakers through secure micropayments. 6️⃣ We are serving as an official partner and judge for @Bitget_AI’s Hackathon S1, supporting a $50,000 prize pool for developers building natural-language trading strategies. 7️⃣ Our Co-Founder @ChiZhangData appeared on @jeffwilser’s @AiCuriousHQ podcast to unpack the structural shift toward agentic commerce and why autonomous customers are arriving faster than expected. 8️⃣ We continued the Kite Community Growth Plan with a new AI sharing session on professional motion graphics and announced our upcoming Kite Image Guessing Game for the community. The rails for the autonomous economy are being laid across the globe. 🪁

@jeffwilser @ChiZhangData @AiCuriousHQ @consensus2026 Agentic commerce abstracts away the checkout flow entirely. The UX becomes permissioning, not purchasing. That's a massive design space most product teams haven't internalized yet. 👀

"Agentic commerce is coming sooner than people think." That's @GoKiteAI CEO @ChiZhangData on the new episode of @AiCuriousHQ. I hosted the AI Summit at @consensus2026 this year--Agentic Commerce was our core theme. It used to feel abstract. Now it's getting real. Link ⤵️

Watch the full conversation 🪁 youtu.be/OMkE-eO4WX8

When AI agents do the shopping, your most important customer might not be a human at all. On @jeffwilser's @AiCuriousHQ podcast, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData unpacked where agentic commerce actually stands today, and why it's arriving faster than most people expect. ▷ The shift is structural: when agents buy on your behalf, businesses start selling to agents, not people. If an agent can't discover you, you're invisible. ▷ It's already a one-way ticket: Shopify first blocked agents, then opened its catalog to them. Visa, Mastercard and Google are all moving in. ▷ The hard part isn't the checkout, it's trust and payments. Kite is the layer that lets your agent pay safely, without ever handing over your credit card. "Agentic commerce is coming sooner than people think."