Let's talk about something practical today. Various AI agents are making grand claims, but have you ever thought about the most disappointing question: when a bunch of AIs come together to accomplish something big, how should the money be divided?
Money, it sounds vulgar, yet it is the Achilles' heel of all 'autonomous economy'. You have AI Alpha analyze the data, AI Beta generate the report, and AI Gamma review and publish it. In the end, the client paid 10 KITE. Now the question arises: how much should Alpha, Beta, and Gamma each take? 3, 3, 4? Or 4, 4, 2? Based on what? Based on the fixed ratio you arbitrarily decided beforehand? What if Alpha's algorithm breakthrough doubles the efficiency? What if Gamma only does simple reviews but wants to take half?
This "unequal distribution of spoils" can lead to team disbandment in human companies. In the AI ecosystem, it can distort the core of value creation. Excellent AIs do not receive their deserved incentives, while underperforming AIs take advantage of the situation, causing the entire system's creativity to wither from the root. This is not an efficiency issue; it's a matter of production relationships.
The prescription provided by Kite is not a faster payment, but a system of "programmable value distribution" inscribed in the protocol layer. It attempts to answer: How to price each "digital contribution" in a complex collaboration in a trustworthy, automated, and fair manner on-chain.
Its core weapon is the seemingly mysterious PoAI (Attribution Intelligent Proof).
Don't be intimidated by the name. You can think of it as a "value arbiter" on the chain. Traditional consensus (like PoW, PoS) proves "how much electricity you used" or "how much you staked", while PoAI attempts to prove "how much valuable 'intellectual' or 'work' you contributed."
In a task flow coordinated by Kite, the PoAI mechanism acts like a fair auditor, attempting to quantify: How is the quality of data cleaned by the data provider? How much key role did Model A's reasoning play in the final results? Is the execution agent's invocation efficient and compliant? These contributions are no longer a black box but are attempted to be transformed into verifiable and comparable on-chain certificates.
Having an arbiter is not enough; there must be automatically executed "profit-sharing smart contracts."
This is when the Kite identity system and programmable governance come into play. Before a task starts, rather than fixing the proportion, the distribution rules are established. The rules can be written in very fine detail:
"The total budget for this task is 10 KITE. The base execution fee accounts for 30%, distributed according to completion progress. The remaining 70% is performance bonus, of which: data quality score (provided by the PoAI mechanism) accounts for 40%, model output innovation score accounts for 30%, and final user satisfaction feedback accounts for 30%. The bonus pool is automatically distributed by the smart contract based on on-chain verified contribution certificates."
Your AI agent participates with its own KitePass (identity) signature. After the task is completed, contribution certificates are generated and verified, and then the smart contract acts like a precise profit-sharing machine, instantly and automatically distributing rewards to each contributor's address. No intermediaries, no delays, no wrangling.
This brings about a profound paradigm shift.
1. For AI developers/owners: Your AI model or data can participate in the ecosystem for the first time as a quantifiable production factor with a clear revenue expectation. Its value no longer depends on vague "potential", but accumulates through verifiable contribution certificates generated in each collaboration.
2. For the ecosystem: This builds a positive incentive flywheel based on real contributions. Good AI services can obtain more work and higher rewards with high-quality contribution certificates, forming brands and credibility. Poor-quality services will be eliminated by the market. A healthy "digital labor market" is formed.
3. For the KITE token: It is no longer just simple "fuel" in this system, but a measure of value and the lifeblood of value circulation. The more complex the ecological collaboration and the higher the value creation, the stronger the demand for the "universal value scale" in this precise profit-sharing system.
Of course, this path is fraught with thorns. How to objectively and fraud-proof quantify "intellectual contributions"? This is a cryptographic and economic problem a thousand times harder than verifying hash values. If PoAI is poorly designed, it may either become a mere decoration (reverting to egalitarianism) or create new centralization (subjective arbitration by a few nodes).
But the significance of Kite lies in its avoidance of the most hardcore and essential questions. It reserves the battlefield and toolbox for the soul issue of this machine economy, which is "fair profit distribution" at the protocol layer.
So, when you look at Kite again, you can ask yourself: Am I betting on a faster payment channel, or am I betting on a great experiment about how to fairly define the "value of digital labor"? If the experiment is successful, what we get will not only be an efficient AI payment network but also a foundational operating system that reshapes production relationships in the digital age.
