If we say AI is a wild horse running in the digital wilderness, then before 2025, most people only care about how fast this horse runs, but never ask where it is going and whose hands the reins are in. I used to be an advocate of this 'speed supremacy', believing that the pitiful transactions per second (TPS) of blockchain were akin to installing an outdated bicycle chain on a Boeing 747 for the power-hungry AI. It wasn't until the emergence of Kite, like a precise scalpel, that cut open the abscess of centralized narratives in AI, that I realized that without blockchain, AI is ultimately just a 'digital pet' raised in black boxes by the giants.
Entering the cryptocurrency market at the end of 2025, if you are still discussing mere computation power trading, you are obviously three versions behind. Kite is not another clumsy decentralized computing intermediary; it is more like a 'notary office of intelligent civilization'. The dilemma we faced in the past was: when you call a large model API, you cannot determine whether the output has been tampered with by some invisible hand or whether it has been watered down in model depth to save computation power. The black box nature of AI makes it the most opaque digital black hole.
Kite's core technological architecture, particularly its advocated 'Verifiable Inference', is like equipping the brain of AI with a 24-hour running black box. Through a clever combination of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and economic game theory, Kite ensures that every model output carries an unforgeable 'digital gene'. This is not just a stacking of technologies; it is a dimensional reduction strike on trust logic. When NVIDIA's graphics cards became the oil of this era, Kite is mining a resource more precious than oil—sovereign trust.
From the perspective of economic models, Kite has not followed the old path of traditional tokens. The 'Ponzi model' that relies solely on rewarding nodes to maintain superficial prosperity has already failed in the 2025 market. Kite has designed a dynamic 'intelligent credit collateral' mechanism. If nodes wish to participate in high-value task simulations, they must stake a certain amount of resources. Once it is proven that their output contains fraud or performance degradation, the protocol will directly confiscate their stake through on-chain consensus. This design transforms tokens from mere chips in the secondary market into 'compliance guarantees' flowing within the AI network.
In the current competitive landscape, although there are predecessors like Bittensor or Render, Kite has pinpointed an extremely niche ecological position: the underlying consensus of AI agents. By December 2025, we find that 70% of on-chain operations in the market have already been completed by AI agents. If the decision-making processes of these agents are centralized, then the decentralization touted by Web3 will completely devolve into empty talk. Kite, through its lightweight verification protocol, enables these AI agents to obtain 'compliance endorsements' on ETH or even BNB chains with extremely low latency.
However, any great narrative comes with thorns. Kite's biggest challenge currently lies in balancing 'verification costs' and 'response speed'. Although ZK hardware acceleration (ZKEA) technology has made breakthroughs this year, achieving millisecond-level verification for a hundred billion parameter model remains at the forefront of engineering. Additionally, regulatory bodies remain vigilant about the on-chain distribution of 'unfiltered AI content'. How Kite dances between privacy protection and compliance filtering will determine whether it can cross the deep chasm from the Web3 carnival to mainstream application penetration.
For investors and developers on the front lines of the market, I recommend paying attention to the 'oracle upgrade nodes' in the Kite ecosystem. As more complex RWA assets are valued in real-time through AI, these nodes that can provide verifiable AI data streams will become the lifeline of on-chain finance. Do not gamble with full warehouses; instead, observe the activity frequency of its developer community on GitHub, especially regarding optimizations for inference proof algorithms.
As we approach 2026, AI is no longer a string of mysterious code in the cloud; it needs the blockchain to provide it with identity, boundaries, and the motivation to 'do good' even without supervision. Kite shows me that blockchain is not a burden for AI but the most critical trust foundation for AI's journey towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). If you still think AI does not need blockchain, it may just be because you haven't seen what that runaway horse looks like.
This article is an independent analysis and does not constitute investment advice.
