I’ve been around crypto long enough to know the pattern. Every cycle has its “next big thing.” Most of them look impressive for about three months and then quietly disappear. So I’m usually pretty numb to new narratives by now.
Kite AI cut through that a bit for me.
I first bumped into it during the whole agentic economy wave earlier this year. Everyone was suddenly talking about AI agents running businesses, paying for compute, trading autonomously. It sounded cool, but also very hand-wavy. Most projects pitching it felt like they were stapling “AI” onto an existing chain and calling it a day.
Kite felt different because it wasn’t trying to do everything. It was very specific: machine-to-machine payments, identity, and constraints, built at the base layer. Not a general-purpose EVM with AI branding. A chain designed around agents from day one.
That alone was enough to make me look twice.
What actually pulled me in
The x402 payment setup is the first thing that really clicked. Built with Coinbase, it’s designed so agents can pay each other in real time. No waiting on blocks. No worrying about gas spikes. On testnet, it felt almost invisible agents just paying each other mid-task.
If the future really involves millions of agents buying data, renting compute, or subscribing to services, that kind of latency matters. A lot.
The identity system was the second hook. Agents don’t just share a wallet with a human. They get their own cryptographic identity, with permissions that can be delegated and revoked. Reputation carries across sessions. After losing money to dumb wallet mistakes in the past, this felt like infrastructure built by people who’ve actually been burned before.
PoAI is still early, but it’s interesting. Instead of rewarding whoever has the most stake, rewards flow to useful contributions models, datasets, agents that actually do something. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s aiming at the right problem.
About the token ($KITE)
The token launch was messy. No point pretending otherwise. Price ran up near $0.11, then slid back toward $0.09, where it’s been hanging around. Market cap sits around $165M, while FDV is way higher, so unlock pressure is real.
Still, the token isn’t just decorative.
$KITE is used for gas, staking, governance, and paying for premium agent services. More importantly, protocol fees come in as stablecoins and get used to buy back KITE. If agent volume ever actually shows up, that loop starts to matter.
Not guaranteed. But at least the mechanics make sense.
The funding side helps too. Around $33M raised, including money from PayPal Ventures, General Catalyst, and Coinbase Ventures. That’s not fast retail money. Those groups understand payments and infrastructure better than most.
The risks (because there are plenty)
This is still very early. Mainnet is fresh. New Layer-1s break in weird ways, especially when they’re doing things like state channels and AI attribution. I haven’t seen exploits yet, but that doesn’t mean much.
Adoption is the real question. Everyone loves talking about AI agents, but are we actually there? If developers don’t start building agents that genuinely need to pay each other all the time, the chain stays quiet and the token drifts.
Competition is brutal too. Fetch Bittensor General AI infra plays. Even normal payment layers could eat part of this if they adapt fast enough.
And yeah the airdrop farming was wild. Plenty of short-term holders, plenty of supply waiting to unlock. Price could stay choppy for a while.
Why I’m still paying attention
I put a small position on after mainnet, not because I think this moons next month, but because it feels like infrastructure that might matter three to five years out.
If even a fraction of the agentic economy vision becomes real, having a chain built specifically for fast, cheap, autonomous payments could end up being important. Not exciting. Important.
This isn’t a meme bet. It’s not yield farming. It’s kind of boring in a way that usually ages better than hype.
I’m not all-in. Sized it like any other alt. Money I can lose without losing sleep.
But out of everything I’ve looked at lately, Kite is one of the few where I can actually explain why the token might matter if AI agents become real economic actors.
We’ll see. 2026 should make things clearer. If real agent volume shows up, this could quietly work. If not, it joins the long list of well-funded ideas that never quite landed.
DYOR, obviously. But yeah this one’s on my watchlist.
