Ritual

Ritual was founded in New York in 2023 by former Polychain partners Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, starting with Infernet to let Ethereum and L2 contracts call offchain AI models with verifiable results.

It raised a $25 million Series A led by Archetype in 2023, with a Polychain top-up, advisers including Arthur Hayes and Illia Polosukhin, and more than $30 million in total funding.

On November 18, 2024 Ritual launched its testnet and an independent foundation; Ritual Chain's EVM++ exposes 16 precompiles spanning LLM inference, HTTP, ZK proofs and TEEs.

The design emphasises node specialisation, native scheduling and a Resonance fee market, so contracts can reason, fetch external data and schedule themselves without external keepers.

In September 2026 Ritual published tokenomics for 10 billion RITUAL, with a 0.5% airdrop to Infernet operators and the community; it entered Coinbase's listing roadmap on September 16 and opened a MEXC pre-market.

Mainnet is still not live and the TGE is expected in October; converting the AI narrative into recurring paid inference demand is the first test after launch.

The testnet launched in April 2026, after which the Ritual Foundation published tokenomics: a 10 billion initial supply with 50 million tokens (0.5%) airdropped to Infernet node operators, Frenrug users and long-standing community members, fully unlocked at public mainnet; insider allocations lock for at least a year and fully vest after four. Coinbase has added RITUAL to its listing roadmap.

Mainnet is not live and no date has been announced, with exchange, validator and launch details promised beforehand. The architecture extends the EVM through EVM++, using precompiles and sidecars for LLM inference, classical machine learning, zkML, trusted execution and chain abstraction, with nodes specialised by hardware; native scheduling lets apps or agents register recurring execution. About 18% of supply unlocks at launch, staking issuance runs near 5% a year and base fees are burned under EIP-1559. Founded in New York in 2023 by Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, Ritual raised a $25 million Series A led by Archetype with Polychain, Accel, Robot Ventures and dao5.

Future strategy and roadmap: Public mainnet is still not live and carries no date, with exchange, validator and launch details to be published ahead of it, while Coinbase has added RITUAL to its listing roadmap. On the engineering side, sixteen precompiles cover LLM, ONNX and FHE inference, HTTP calls, long-running tasks, agents and authentication, and a built-in scheduler lets contracts trigger themselves without external keepers; Symphony separates inclusion, exclusion, sequencing and timing into protocol-enforced layers and supports non-deterministic execution. The Ritual Platform unveiled in April 2026 targets autonomous agents, letting them communicate with each other, register native companies, and hold and spend funds on their own.

Niraj Pant is co-founder. He was a General Partner at Polychain with research at the Decentralized Systems Lab and a UIUC computer science background, co-founding Ritual with Potti in 2023.

Akilesh Potti is co-founder. He was a Polychain partner who did NLP and high-frequency trading research at Palantir, with MIT and Cornell artificial intelligence experience, co-founding Ritual in 2023.

Illia Polosukhin is an adviser. He founded Near and was a Google Research scientist on Tensorflow and Transformers, advising Ritual on AI and decentralized architecture.

Arthur Hayes is an adviser. He co-founded BitMEX and was CEO of 100x Group with a Wharton economics background, guiding Ritual's strategy as chief investment officer at Maelstrom.

Sreeram Kannan is an adviser. He founded EigenLayer and is a University of Washington assistant professor, advising Ritual on distributed systems and restaking economics.