The current public chain market has a significant misconception: everyone is still using the standards for measuring "human applications" to evaluate AI public chains. They look at daily active users (DAU), community activity, and whether the interface is visually appealing. However, in the past few days, I have delved into the developer documentation recently updated by Kite, and during this process, I realized that Kite is playing a completely different game. It doesn't want to serve you and me; it aims to serve those code without a physical form—AI Agents.
Why do I say this? I captured a set of on-chain data on the testnet and discovered an interesting phenomenon: the vast majority of transactions on Kite are extremely high frequency and extremely low amount micropayments. The average transaction amount is even less than 0.01 dollars. If this were on Ethereum or Solana, such a transaction model would be a complete loss-making endeavor, with just the gas fees resulting in a huge loss. But on Kite, this is the norm.
This touches on Kite's fundamental design philosophy: it is building a 'non-human' economic model.
Let me give you a practical scenario. I tried writing a simple script that allows an Agent running on Kite to call another Agent that provides weather data. In the traditional Web2 world, this would require me to buy an API Key, link a credit card, and be extremely cumbersome. In Kite's architecture, my Agent simply sent a request with an x402 protocol header to the other party, which instantly returned data, while my Agent's wallet automatically deducted a small amount of $KITE tokens. The entire process involved no human intervention, no 'confirm payment' pop-up, and was completed in milliseconds.
This is the frightening aspect of Kite. It is actually redefining the concept of 'user'. Future on-chain users may not be people 99% of the time, but robots that perform thousands of interactions every second. These robots do not need a beautiful UI, nor do they need customer service; they only require stable, low-cost payment channels and an immutable execution environment.
What I see as promising is that Kite seems to be the only project currently that has successfully implemented 'machine payments' at the protocol level. Many projects claim to be AI public chains, but are actually just selling computing power or launching a Memecoin. Kite's x402 protocol is essentially laying the tracks for the future machine economy.
Of course, as a researcher, I must pour a bucket of cold water on this. This 'machine economy' is still in its extremely early stages of development. I took a look around on Github and found that there are not many mature Agent frameworks that perfectly adapt to the x402 protocol. This means that even if Kite has built the road, there are still very few cars running on it. For those who want to hold $KITE for the long term, the biggest risk lies not in the technology, but in whether the AI Agent track can explode as expected.
Additionally, I have noticed that Kite is recently promoting a 'hybrid node' mechanism, attempting to balance decentralization and computational efficiency. This is, in fact, walking a tightrope. If too much emphasis is placed on efficiency, it can easily become a centralized cloud service; if too much emphasis is placed on decentralization, it cannot withstand the high concurrency of AI. Current solutions are not yet perfect, and it is common to see node operators in the community complaining about synchronization delays.
If you are buying Kite with the mindset of 'speculating on the next Solana', you might be disappointed because its narrative logic is completely different. But if you believe that in the next five years, the main flow of traffic and capital on the internet will be conducted by AI agents, then Kite is currently the closest infrastructure I can find on the market to that future. Its current price includes a portion of the option premium for the explosion of the 'machine economy'.
I am optimistic about it, not because of how much its token price can rise, but because it is attempting to solve a problem that truly belongs to the future: what currency do machines use when they start doing business? At present, the answer given by Kite is the most convincing.
