If the early blockchain can be compared to a ledger that can only record accounts, then the Web3 of 2025, due to the comprehensive involvement of AI, has transformed into a breathing, thinking organism. Last week, in the developer community of the Kite protocol, I spent three whole hours entangled with the administrator to clarify a logic deadlock regarding the inference verification node. The administrator named Ken not only broke down the complex computational topology in a few sentences but also helped me rewrite a piece of redundant code. It wasn't until yesterday at a private technology salon in Singapore that I discovered this administrator, who stayed up late in Discord helping users solve problems, was actually the chief AI architect of a top Silicon Valley company.
This sense of identity displacement is precisely the biggest underlying logic of this year's crypto market: the smartest brains are no longer satisfied with building algorithms in walled gardens; they are bringing the most sophisticated weapons, trying to reconstruct the power structure of AI in a decentralized world.
The reason Kite can get such a level of tech giants to voluntarily come down and preach is fundamentally that it has solved one of the most fatal bottlenecks in the marriage of Web3 and AI: trust cost. In the context of 2025, computing power is no longer a scarce resource; the real scarce resource is 'who can prove that this AI is not lying.' When you call an on-chain LLM model for asset allocation, how do you know that the returned result is generated by a high-performance model and not some small workshop using a rudimentary algorithm to fool you?
Kite's architecture is like adding a fully transparent black box to the neural network of AI. It uses lightweight zero-knowledge proof technology to convert every key node of AI reasoning into a verifiable hash. This means AI is no longer an unknowable black box but a logically rigorous transparent algorithm. On a technical level, this paradigm of 'reasoning is proof' completely breaks through the barriers between the storage layer and execution layer of BNB Greenfield.
From a market positioning perspective, Kite has evolved from its initial middleware phase to become the hottest 'intelligent liquidity base' by the end of 2025. Current on-chain data shows that Kite's daily active AI Agent interactions have surpassed 1.2 million, and the developer retention rate within its ecosystem is as high as 68%. This is unimaginable in the past DeFi projects that were 'shooting one bullet and changing places.' This stickiness comes from an essential need: in an era filled with AI agents on Twitter and trading terminals, data that has not undergone verifiable computational processing is regarded as 'digital trash' in the eyes of high-end traders.
In terms of economic models, Kite has abandoned the old path of purely attracting TVL through inflation and has instead adopted a 'credit profit-sharing' model. Simply put, if you run a verification node, you earn not only token rewards but also the entire network's endorsement of your computational credit. This credit can be used as collateral in cross-chain protocols to directly exchange for mainstream assets like ETH or BNB. This value capture logic makes Kite's tokens no longer just governance air but transforms them into 'computational credit certificates' in the AI era.
However, any ambitious blueprint comes with risks. Kite's biggest challenge currently lies in whether the delays in generating ZK proofs can always remain below the market trading response time as the complexity of the models grows exponentially. Additionally, the legal liability for decentralized AI generation is still in a gray area for regulators. But this is where the opportunity lies; when a field hasn't been filled with legal text, it becomes a goldmine for tech geeks.
For ordinary participants, my practical advice is: stop focusing on those MEMEs that only post emojis; that's like picking up cigarette butts in a casino. You should try running a lightweight node of Kite or pay attention to AI agent platforms that integrate Kite's verification services. The year 2026 will be the breakout year for sovereign AI, and today's Kite is like Uniswap in 2019, still seeming a bit hardcore and rough, but the spark that changes production relationships has already been ignited.
The architect from that big company said something to me at the end of the salon that left a deep impression. He said, 'At centralized giants, I'm just optimizing an ad click-through rate algorithm; but at Kite, I'm participating in the formulation of the constitution for digital life for the next hundred years.'
The winter of 2025 is not cold, because the light of technology is gradually being transmitted from the hands of these community managers to every individual deeply immersed in Web3.
This article is a personal independent analysis and does not constitute investment advice.
