Kite has been sitting in the back of my mind lately, mostly because I keep running into the same question whenever people talk about autonomous agents: which chain actually supports the way agents behave—not the way humans behave? It’s strange how many discussions still approach this from the old wallet-owner lens. Agents don’t think about gas fees the way we do. They don’t wait for finality. They don’t negotiate with UX. They operate in loops, in rhythms, in bursts of micro-requests, expecting identity, trust and settlement to be native. And the more I look at what’s available today, the more the differences between KITE, Ethereum, Solana and Cosmos start to feel sharper than we usually admit.
I kept noticing that developers experimenting with agent workflows love the idea of using existing chains, but end up duct-taping identity and session logic on top of them. It always feels improvised. Agents don’t have a persistent self the same way humans do. They have tasks, episodes, and ephemeral sessions. And that’s where Kite does something I haven’t really seen before with its three-layer identity model: one identity for the human creating or supervising the task, one identity for the agent itself, and one identity for each session the agent spins up. It doesn’t sound dramatic at first, but when you think about what agents actually need, it’s the first time an L1 seems aligned with how automated systems behave rather than how crypto users behave.
Ethereum, of course, is the default choice for almost anything. And I get why—maturity, liquidity, tooling, L2 ecosystems, audits, battle-testing. But when you zoom into agentic requirements, Ethereum starts to feel like a very powerful tool built for a slightly different job. The gas model is volatile. The block time and finality—despite improvements—still sit in a range that makes high-frequency, low-value agent calls feel expensive or awkward unless you rely on L2s. That’s not a problem for human activity. Humans don’t send five hundred micro-transactions per minute. Agents do. And even though proposals like the next wave of upgrades aim to expand rollup capacity and cut costs further, the core network isn’t optimised for agent patterns; it’s optimised for economic universality.
Solana is almost the opposite. It behaves like someone intentionally engineered a chain for machine activity—fast, parallel, aggressively low-cost, with the new upgrades pushing finality toward fractions of a second. When I hear builders talk about Solana for agents, they usually mean: “This chain feels alive.” And it does. But I’ve also noticed something else. Solana’s speed solves one big problem for agents but exposes another: identity and governance don’t come baked in the way agent ecosystems actually need. You can attach identity frameworks on top, but they never feel native in the way agents require for autonomous coordination. Solana provides raw performance, but not the full behavioural stack.
Cosmos is an interesting in-between. If Ethereum is the gravity well and Solana is the racecar, Cosmos feels like a workshop—flexible, modular, sovereign. You can tailor a chain to your agent architecture almost perfectly, and IBC gives you communication without the weirdness of wrapped assets. The new roadmap makes it even easier to connect into Ethereum or expand into other ecosystems with lighter upgrade friction. But the catch is obvious: with that much freedom comes responsibility. Most agent teams don’t want to run an entire chain, maintain validator dynamics, or deal with the operational complexity that comes with sovereignty. Cosmos gives you the ability to design the perfect agent chain—if you want to build a chain. Not everyone does.
Kite sits in a different mental category for me. It’s not trying to be everything. It’s not trying to be the fastest or the most distributed or the most liquid. It’s trying to be the chain where agents can exist with verifiable identity, controlled behaviour, and transaction patterns that match the tempo of autonomous systems. And the more the industry shifts toward agentic commerce, the more this narrow focus feels like a strength rather than a limitation. I kept seeing builders reference the same idea: agents need to pay each other in predictable ways that don’t spike, stall, or compete with human-driven activity. Kite’s architecture seems almost deliberately shaped to make identity, governance and settlement feel machine-native rather than human-centric.
There’s also something subtle happening: as more protocols explore things like agent-to-agent markets, autonomous service discovery, and micro-tasking, you start noticing which chains can realistically handle thousands of background payments per minute without eating the user’s margin. Some chains can brute-force it on speed alone. Some chains can handle it through modularity. Kite approaches it through behavioural design. And even though it’s early, the pattern is clear: the agent economy needs chains that understand identity as much as it understands throughput.
It’s odd watching all of this unfold. A year ago, the idea of “agentic payments” felt like a niche conversation. Now you see headlines about new protocols, investors calling this the next infrastructure layer, and developers reframing their mental models around automated coordination rather than user-initiated calls. And somehow Kite keeps showing up in those discussions—not as a replacement for Ethereum, Solana, or Cosmos, but as the chain designed for a world where agents are not an add-on, but a primary actor in the economy.
That’s the part that keeps me thinking. Not which chain is objectively better, but which chain understands the shape of the future it’s being asked to support.
