Every Other L1 Pays for TVL, Kite Pays for Future Monopoly
Most chains throw money at whatever brings short term numbers. Validators, liquidity, meme storms. Kite is doing something completely different. The treasury is cutting huge checks to small agent developer groups that barely have Twitter accounts. It looks strange until you realize Kite is not trying to win 2024 metrics. It is trying to decide who will own the entire agent economy ten years from now.
The Grant Tiers Are Brutally Specific
Tier One sounds simple on paper. Keep a persistent identity alive for half a year with clean payments and no hiccups. It filters out the unserious players fast.
Tier Two tightens the screws. The agent must move more than ten million in total value using only session keys. Most teams never touch that requirement.
Tier Three is where the real play becomes obvious. It is invitation only. You need a fleet doing ten thousand real time transactions per day across several identities. The teams that qualify for this are not casual builders. These are the groups that already think in terms of agent swarms. A Tier Three fleet can walk away with tens of millions worth of KITE over a long vesting schedule, but the entire amount evaporates if the fleet ever goes silent. Kite is not paying for hype. Kite is paying for permanent residents.
The Lock-In Is Baked Into the Economics
The grants come in KITE that cannot be sold for twelve months. That one rule changes everything. A fleet taking a top tier grant must run agents strong enough to earn real on chain revenue or they bleed money while holding locked tokens. It forces them to grow inside Kite’s ecosystem. Leaving means burning their entire stack. Staying means building a long term foothold. The system quietly pushes every serious team into becoming part of Kite’s core infrastructure.
Reputation Becomes the Real Prize
Once milestones are completed, the fleets join Phase Two with reputation levels no newcomer can fake. These scores do not just look pretty on dashboards. They directly influence how much blockspace an agent pays for, how much weight its attestations carry, and which coordination shards it gets access to. The early fleets walk into Phase Two already positioned as the ones everyone else must work around. Kite is not just funding them. It is shaping the future hierarchy of the network.
The Treasury Spend Is Tiny Compared to the Control It Buys
Phase One uses less than nine percent of total KITE supply. That small slice will seed the identities that later control most of the economic flow in the agent layer. Kite is not buying deposits or synthetic TVL. It is buying the early DNA of the network. It is deciding who gets to stand at the top once agents become the main actors in on chain markets.
Kite talks about grants like any other ecosystem would.
But what it is doing is much closer to state planning. A deliberate push to ensure the strongest fleets grow inside its borders instead of somewhere else.
When Phase Two begins and the treasury stops handing out tokens, the fleets funded today will already be the ones with reputation that actually matters. Everyone else will be paying to catch up.
Call it funding if you want.
It looks a lot more like Kite building an empire while everyone is distracted by dashboards.
