Kite was just another “AI agent” crypto project announcement scrolling past my feed, and I almost swiped right over it. My eyes just glaze over now. Another one? It all sounds like the same pitch: autonomous this, intelligent that. I’ve gotten burned before on concepts that were ten steps ahead of what the tech could actually do.
When I first read about Kite, I did that same skeptical squint. Another blockchain for AI agents? But the phrase “agentic payments” stuck with me. It wasn’t just about AI doing tasks; it was about AI transacting. That’s a different, more concrete problem. My confusion was simple: why does an AI need its own blockchain? Can’t it just use my wallet?
The problem they’re tackling, as I see it, is trust and control. If an AI is going to book a flight for you or pay for an API subscription, it needs spending power. But you can’t just give it your private key. That’s suicide. Kite’s fix is a three-layer identity system. Think of it like this: you (the user) are the boss. You create an agent (your employee) and give it a specific budget and rules. That agent can then start work sessions, which are like temporary, logged work orders. The boss, the employee, and the job site are all separate. If the agent gets compromised, the damage is contained to that session. It’s a permissions structure for your money, built directly into the chain.
What makes sense to me is that they’re building the plumbing first. The KITE token’s phased utility shows that. Phase one is just getting people and builders using the network. The staking, governance, and fees come later, once the system is actually working. That feels responsible, maybe even a bit boring, which I kind of like in this hype-driven space. They’re not promising that their AI will make you rich tomorrow; they’re trying to build secure rails for when AIs inevitably need to handle value.
The real test, the part that’s still unproven, is whether builders will actually create useful agents that normal people want to use on this specific chain. Being EVM-compatible is a smart move, it lowers the barrier for developers. The strength is in the design: the identity layers seem to thoughtfully address the scary parts of letting software spend your crypto.
But it’s a coordination game. The value isn’t just in the tech; it’s in whether a community of agents emerges that can actually do things for each other on this network. It could evolve into a bustling marketplace of specialized tools trading services, or it could remain a very well-designed solution waiting for a problem.
It leaves me thinking about how weird our digital lives are about to become. We’re moving from managing wallets and signing transactions to managing agents and approving policies. The question isn’t really whether AI will use money, but what kind of financial system we build for it. Are we just giving it our old, clunky tools, or are we building something that actually understands what it means to delegate
