Kite @GoKiteAI AI payment chain, is it a paradigm shift or just old wine in a new bottle? @KiteAIChinese
E-commerce is stepping into chat boxes: OpenAI has announced Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), compressing "discovery—comparison—payment—after-sales" into a single conversation; retail giants like Walmart have announced their integration, symbolizing the transition of "agentic commerce" from concept to reality.
In this context, Kite is waving the flag of "The First AI Payment Blockchain," claiming to provide a foundation for autonomous agents with verifiable identity, programmable governance, and native stablecoin settlement.
With the proliferation of EVM chains, is "AI + Payment" just old wine in a new bottle?
If "AI + Payment" merely embeds a cash register into chat, it indeed feels like a skin change; Kite aims to write risk control strategies into on-chain contracts regarding who can spend, how much, whether approval is needed, and when to revoke. Only when "permissions and payments" become a public composable infrastructure can agents be trusted to be empowered within enterprise and merchant systems—this is precisely the trio of commitments emphasized repeatedly on its official website and materials.
Why is PayPal betting on this?
Kite has raised $18 million in Series A led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, totaling $33 million in funding. Let's analyze PayPal Ventures' investment interpretation, which straightforwardly points out: Kite attempts to integrate programmable trust, self-custody, composability, real-time throughput, streaming payments, and AI workflows into an L1 aimed at agents, allowing agents to "act on behalf of users with security, efficiency, and auditability."
Here, I think it's crucial to understand Kite's strategic positioning. When a large number of transactions are automatically triggered by agents, stablecoins constrained by strategies will become a necessity; investing in such an "agent-native clearing and settlement + governance stack" is expected to open high-frequency, programmable consumption scenarios for PayPal's stablecoin $PYUSD, but this does not equate to a completed product-level direct connection.
Why not choose Ethereum L2 and instead build on the Avalanche subnet?
Kite will launch an AI-focused L1 in the Avalanche @avax ecosystem; this type of Avalanche L1 (evolved from subnets) emphasizes single-tenant high bandwidth, higher gas limits, and an upgradable fee model to reduce "neighbor noise" and provide sovereignty and adjustable parameters. For "micro-payments within conversations," confirmation latency and stable throughput are experience red lines; making limits/frequency control/approval/revocation into "contractual risk control" also requires high-frequency iteration of block parameters and fee models. From the perspective of engineering organization, a dedicated L1's "self-managing" is often easier to deliver controllable latency curves and compliance posture than a shared L2—at least the routes and tools provided by Avalanche are logically coherent.
Finally, returning to the essence of business, Kite is being noticed not because it "creates another chain," but because it attempts to combine identity—governance—payment into a set of "cash register + company bylaws" that can be reused by developers and merchants; this coincides with the advancement of ACP at the front-end experience layer: one side shapes the interface of "conversation equals shopping," while the other provides the foundation that allows agents to truly spend money and be held accountable.
The key to whether this can be realized lies in:
1) Governance strategy templates: whether it provides out-of-the-box limit/frequency control/approval/whitelist and blacklist templates and auditing tools, with real enterprises reusing them.
2) Merchant and platform integration: the emergence of verifiable access cases (rather than logo collages), and practical closed loops with stablecoins/payment networks.
If these two points can be fulfilled, Kite may not just be "old wine in a new bottle," but rather write a set of "accounting and charter" for the agentic economy; otherwise, it will just be another wave in the flood of EVM packaging.
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