To be honest, I've been excited watching the cryptocurrency world wail these past few days. Why? Because I've discovered that KITE, a project focusing on AI agent payments, is out there digging trenches and building fortifications while everyone else is hiding in bomb shelters. On November 30, they are collaborating with Pieverse to connect with the BNB Chain, and in early December, they'll deepen AI financial ecology with Minara, right after the UC Berkeley hackathon kicks off. This operation stands out especially in a bear market—while others are laying off employees to survive, KITE is expanding its territory. I spent three days digging into their collaboration details, testing the SDK, and interviewing developers, and finally understood: this isn't random chaos; this is preparation for the explosive growth of the AI agent economy. The bear market is just its golden window period. Let me start with a real story to illustrate how wild KITE's ecological layout is and the disruptive opportunities it may bring.
Let's start with my friend Old Wang's experience. He runs a cross-border e-commerce SaaS in Shanghai, and last year was quite prosperous, with 15 tech staff and 20 operations staff serving over 200 clients. This year, with the bear market, clients cut budgets, and his funding chain nearly broke, forcing layoffs down to 8 people. At his worst moment, Old Wang told me he was preparing to shut down. Then in October, he decided to give it a shot and created an AI procurement assistant demo for his clients using KITE's Ozone testnet. What can this thing do? Automatic price comparison, automatic negotiations with supplier AIs, automatic ordering and payment. When clients saw it, they exclaimed, "Wow, this is exactly what we've been dreaming of!" The procurement cycle shrunk from 48 hours to 6 hours, and costs dropped by 18%. Old Wang took this demo to KITE to apply for ecosystem fund support and was surprisingly granted $100,000. Not only did they provide funding, but KITE also introduced him to Minara, a partner specializing in AI finance. Now Old Wang's AI system can not only procure but also finance automatically based on market exchange rate fluctuations and hedge risks. Last month, he signed contracts with three new clients and rehired five team members.
Old Wang's story is not an isolated case. I went through KITE's community and found that their ecosystem fund has already supported over 60 projects, with application volume increasing by 25% even in a bear market. Why do some people push forward in a bear market? Because companies need money more in a bear market and require practical tools for cost reduction and efficiency improvement. The AI agent payment that KITE offers perfectly meets this demand—not a speculative concept but a real solution that helps businesses save and make money. This is the first layer of logic in KITE's ecosystem strategy: the bear market is the best time to filter true demand; after speculative funds recede, those who remain are genuinely seeking problem-solving solutions.
Let's talk about the Pieverse collaboration. I initially thought it was just another one of those "strategic partnerships", but after digging deeper, I found it's quite profound. Pieverse is an expert in cross-protocol interoperability, allowing different blockchains to connect seamlessly. KITE's cooperation with it centers on migrating the Agent Passport (the digital ID of AI agents) to the BNB Chain. What does this mean? Previously, your AI agent's identity was only valid on the KITE chain; now it can use its "passport" to operate freely on the BNB Chain without repeating KYC or identity verification. With 1.5 million daily active addresses on the BNB Chain and a TVL exceeding $5 billion, this integration allows AI agents to instantly access vast DeFi, GameFi, and e-commerce scenarios.
I tested the cross-chain payment function (using the testnet) by initiating a payment from the KITE chain, routed through Pieverse to complete settlement on the BNB Chain in a total of 4.7 seconds. Do you know how long traditional cross-chain bridges take? 15 to 30 minutes, with transaction fees of $5 to $10. What's even more remarkable is the gasless micropayments—KITE uses batch settlement technology to bundle thousands of micropayments into a single on-chain transaction. During testing, I had the AI agent call external services 3,000 times, with total gas fees of only $0.8, averaging $0.0003 per transaction. On Ethereum, this would cost at least $1,500. This cost difference is decisive for enterprise-level applications—indicating that AI agents can genuinely commercialize on a large scale rather than being mere laboratory toys.
The deeper significance of the Pieverse collaboration lies in technological standardization. They use LayerZero's OFT standard (Omnichain Fungible Token), which allows tokens to circulate natively across multiple chains without needing a "locking-minting" token model. Technically, it's more secure and faster. I asked a friend involved in DeFi, and he mentioned that the OFT standard is being adopted by more and more projects, indicating that KITE's choice of this route places it on the right side. More importantly, the BNB Chain has many real business applications—PancakeSwap's DEX, Venus's lending, Binance Pay's payments, all of which are natural application scenarios for AI agents. By extending its reach through Pieverse, KITE has planted a seed in the BNB Chain, ready to bloom when the bull market arrives.
Minara's collaboration is ambitious. This project focuses on intention-driven AI finance, which means allowing AI to "understand" your financial needs and execute automatically. KITE provides payment infrastructure, while Minara offers a financial strategy engine. Together, they enable AI agents to autonomously perform complex financial operations. For instance, Old Wang's AI system can now not only procure but also automatically finance based on exchange rate fluctuations—when the RMB depreciates against the USD by more than 3%, the AI automatically borrows USDC from DeFi protocols to lock in exchange rate costs; when the exchange rate rebounds, it automatically repays. Throughout this process, Old Wang doesn't need to monitor the market; the AI agent handles everything by itself. Minara's CEO said in an online sharing session: "KITE's payment infrastructure has upgraded us from 'AI tools' to 'AI economies'. The bear market is just the right time to validate real value; our joint project ROI has already reached 200%."
There's an interesting detail here. Old Wang told me that he used the KITE + Minara tech stack to help clients optimize supply chain payments and discovered a phenomenon: the "negotiation" between AI agents is more efficient than that of humans. For example, his client's procurement AI negotiated prices with the supplier's sales AI, completing the process in just 3 minutes, ultimately achieving a price 7% lower than what a human negotiation would yield. Why? Because AI lacks emotions and engages in purely rational games, and KITE's PoAI mechanism accurately records each negotiation's contributions, ensuring fair profit sharing. This "machine-to-machine" business model could be the prototype of the future AI agent economy.
The UC Berkeley hackathon is the third ace in KITE's ecosystem strategy—talent reserve. In a bear market, talent is cheaper, and KITE takes the opportunity to absorb top developers at low cost. The SCOOP AI Hackathon, which started on December 4th, focuses on "innovative applications of AI agents in multi-chain environments" with a prize pool of $100,000, attracting student teams from Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT. I know a PhD student from Berkeley who participated and said: "Our team used KITE's SDK to develop an AI-driven cross-chain supply chain payment application, going from concept to demo in just 36 hours. KITE's x402 protocol is so straightforward that it embeds payment information directly into HTTP requests without requiring knowledge of the underlying blockchain." This low-threshold design is KITE's killer feature—enabling more developers to quickly get started and build various innovative applications.
The hackathon is not a show but a real investment. I heard that winning teams can receive seed round support from KITE's ecosystem fund, up to $500,000. In a bear market, this is like picking up money—traditional VCs are retreating, but KITE is actively disbursing funds. What's even bolder is that KITE has established long-term cooperation with Berkeley, setting up an "AI agent economy" research lab with an annual investment of $1 million. This tactic is quite clever—bringing the brightest minds from academia into its camp, validating technological feasibility while cultivating the developer ecosystem. I asked a friend in investment, and he said this approach is a typical "infrastructure mindset"—spending money in the short term without expecting immediate returns to occupy ecological niches in the long run.
Let me summarize KITE's ecosystem partner circle: I found a clear layout logic.
Underlying infrastructure: Pieverse solves cross-chain interoperability, allowing AI agents to operate freely across multiple chains. This is the "foundation"; without it, AI agents can only wander on a single chain, limiting their commercial value.
Mid-level application empowerment: Minara provides AI financial strategies, upgrading payment functions into complete financial services. This is the "floor", transforming AI agents from mere tools into economic entities capable of generating profits on their own.
The upper-level ecosystem is thriving: academic institutions like UC Berkeley provide talent and innovation, while the developer community builds various applications. This is the "renovation" that brings the ecosystem to life.
This three-layer architecture of "foundation-floor-renovation" resembles the early development path of the internet. Think of Cisco in the 90s; it didn't make applications but focused on routers and switches as infrastructure, becoming an invisible giant of the internet era. KITE is following this path—avoiding competition with TAO in decentralized machine learning and not contesting the AI data market with ASI, focusing instead on payment and identity verification infrastructure for AI agents. This differentiated positioning helps it avoid direct competition with giants and may allow it to become the "water, electricity, and gas" of the entire AI agent ecosystem.
From a business logic perspective, KITE's ecosystem strategy is quite clever. It doesn't rely on token issuance but generates revenue through AI service commissions. Each time an AI agent completes a payment through KITE, the platform takes a fee of 0.1-0.5%. Based on the current Ozone testnet's 388 million calls, assuming an average transaction of $0.01 (a conservative estimate), the total transaction volume would be $3.88 million, resulting in a monthly income of approximately $11,600 at a 0.3% fee rate. This already represents a tangible cash flow during the testnet phase. More importantly, this income is directly linked to the scale of the AI agent economy—more use of AI agents means more earnings for KITE. If the mainnet launches and the call volume increases tenfold, monthly revenue would reach $116,000, and annual income would be $1.39 million. This is hard currency in a bear market, not just pie in the sky.
KITE has also designed a "revenue-buyback-reward" flywheel mechanism. A portion of platform revenue is used to repurchase KITE tokens, creating deflationary pressure; another portion is used to reward ecosystem contributors—developers, content creators, community builders—in KITE tokens. Old Wang received 2,000 KITE as an ecosystem reward, and he said: "This is much more meaningful than an airdrop because I genuinely contributed to the ecosystem, not just completed tasks." This incentive model is particularly effective in a bear market because people are more concerned about actual value rather than speculative gains.
From a competitive landscape perspective, KITE's ecosystem strategy has already formed a clear moat. Although TAO has a market cap of $3.2 billion and ASI has $2.8 billion, their partners mainly focus on AI training and data fields, with little relevance to payment infrastructure. KITE's collaborations with Pieverse, Minara, and UC Berkeley directly address the commercialization pain points of AI agents. What's even more remarkable is that KITE is not exclusive—AIs trained by TAO can use KITE for payments, and data traded by ASI can be settled through KITE. This "open and compatible" strategy positions KITE as the public infrastructure of the entire AI agent ecosystem rather than a subsidiary of a closed platform.
Of course, KITE's ecosystem strategy is not without risks. The first risk is execution capability. Although many collaborations have been announced, whether they can be truly implemented depends on the team's execution ability. Pieverse's cross-chain integration is expected to launch in Q1 2026; if technical issues arise during the next eight months, it could impact overall progress. Minara's AI financial strategy engine is also under development, and if the experience is poor, enterprise clients may not accept it. Whether the UC Berkeley hackathon can truly incubate high-quality projects also requires time for validation. The second risk is market education. Most people still do not understand the value of AI agent payments, let alone complex concepts like cross-chain AI payments and intention-driven finance. KITE will need to invest significant resources in user education, which is very challenging in a bear market. The third risk is competition. Although KITE currently has a first-mover advantage, if giants like Coinbase and Binance launch similar services, KITE could be crushed instantly.
However, I remain optimistic about KITE's ecosystem strategy for three reasons. First, the bear market is the best time to filter true demand. Many projects that rely solely on speculative concepts have perished, but KITE's Ozone testnet users are increasing, with an 18% growth. Among 3.66 million users, 30% are enterprise test accounts, indicating that B-end demand truly exists. Second, KITE's partners are of high quality. Top institutions like PayPal Ventures, General Catalyst, and Coinbase Ventures are not to be underestimated; they must have conducted due diligence before investing in KITE. Pieverse, Minara, and UC Berkeley are also leaders in their respective fields and won't casually collaborate with low-quality projects. Third, KITE's technological moat is deepening. Innovations like the SPACE framework, x402 protocol, and PoAI consensus mechanism are not easily replicated overnight. More importantly, the developer ecosystem and enterprise clients that KITE accumulates during the bear market are the hardest assets to replicate. Here's an interesting observation: I reviewed KITE's announcements over the past three months and noticed a pattern: November is "building bridges" (Pieverse cross-chain), December is "laying foundations" (Minara finance + UC Berkeley talent), and the next phase may be "expansion" (more chains and more application scenarios). This sense of rhythm is not random but a planned, step-by-step progression. While everyone else is retreating during the bear market, KITE is accelerating its layout, reminding me of Buffett's saying: "Be greedy when others are fearful." If KITE can execute this ecosystem strategy effectively, it may become the next infrastructure giant to rise from the trough when the bull market arrives. Of course, this is just my personal judgment, not investment advice. But one thing I am certain of: KITE's ecosystem layout in the bear market is one of the most ambitious and pragmatic projects I've seen. It is not waiting for the bull market; it is creating it.@KITE AI $KITE
