What is Ritual?
Ritual is the most expressive blockchain in existence, with a single focus: enrich what users can do on-chain today to attract the users of tomorrow.
Ritual is powered by novel innovations across the blockchain stack.
Why does the world need another blockchain?
Behind every magnitude increase in blockchain users lies an innovation that enables net-new behavior for the masses. In 2009, Bitcoin enabled anyone, anywhere to send and receive money without relying on centralized intermediaries. In 2015, Ethereum introduced smart contracts, enabling developers to build permissionless, composable financial applications.
Yet, somewhere along the way, we lost sight of building for the net-new user, of expanding the status quo of what could be built with truly trustless and expansive computation. Today’s blockchains prioritize latency and throughput, optimizing for existing users rather than innovating. While these performance improvements matter, they merely scale current use cases instead of unlocking transformative new ones.
Ritual was born from a single focus: enrich what users can do on-chain today to attract the users of tomorrow.
Our expedition began at the intersection of Crypto and Artificial Intelligence. Two things are simultaneously true: it has never been easier for developers to build with AI, crafting dynamic and personalized experiences, and it has never been more important to ensure that the AI technologies we adopt remain open, credibly neutral, and censorship resistant. To that extent, Ritual makes smart contracts actually smart, allowing users to natively tap into on-chain AI, backed by the same trustless properties of modern blockchains.
However, Ritual isn’t just focused on Crypto x AI. By optimizing our underlying architecture for any type of heterogeneous compute, Ritual hyperscales the expressive computation that can be performed on a blockchain. Ritual is the best venue not just for developers looking to harness AI, ZK, or TEEs in their applications, but also for those experimenting at the edges of the unknown, defining new ways to consume underlying infrastructure.
Our architecture efficiently prices, orchestrates, and exposes all types of compute, current or future, enabling Ritual to become the schelling point for all of web3.
Not only will end-users consume applications natively through Ritual, but other blockchains themselves symbiotically benefit through Ritual. High-performance chains that require a prover network (MegaETH, Movement, etc.), modern Rollup-as-a-Service offerings that require efficient execution of heterogeneous compute (Conduit, Caldera, etc.), and the totality of IP, monetized via a verifiable marketplace (Story, Sentient, etc.) will all use Ritual.
The complexity of what you can do on blockchain networks has grown dramatically since inception.
Why does AI need to be on-chain?
Crypto × AI
Today’s developers have unprecedented access to AI tools for creating responsive, tailored user experiences. At the same time, maintaining AI systems that are transparent, unbiased, and free from undue control has become more crucial than ever.
What we introduce: Next-Generation Blockchain Capabilities
Ritual introduces several key innovations to empower radically new on-chain behavior:
Expressive, Heterogeneous Compute
Specialized execution for AI inference, ZK proofs, TEE code, and cross-chain state access.
Scheduled Transactions
Recurring, conditional invocation of smart contract functions, without the need for external keepers.
Enshrined On-Chain AI Models
Train, track, and trade AI models with on-chain provenance, authenticity, and IP primitives.
Model Marketplace
Monetize models transparently with verifiable provenance ensuring security and integrity.
Native Account Abstraction
Fundamentally expand the capabilities of EOA accounts, enabling enhanced UX.
EVM++ Extensions
Inclusion and support of in-demand EIPs that improve user and developer experience.
Resonance
State-of-the-art surplus-maximizing transaction fee mechanism to efficiently match supply and demand.
Symphony
New consensus protocol with dual proof sharding, attested committees, and distributed verification.
Node Specialization
Heterogeneous nodes (not one-size-fits-all) specialized for fine-tuned workloads.
Modular Computational Integrity
Special-purpose, opt-in primitives across provenance, privacy, and computational integrity.
Modular Storage
Storage-agnostic approach to data, with support for web2 (HuggingFace) and web3 (Arweave).
Guardians
Firewall system for nodes to granularly opt-in to execution, while still participating in consensus.
Native Infernet Integration
Ritual nodes seamlessly backed by Infernet’s compute oracle network.
Verifiable Provenance
Immutable records of model origin, updates, and transformations with novel provenance innovations.
Ultimately, Ritual is about much more than any one use case or stakeholder group. It’s about the collective potential of a decentralized, intelligent, and secure computational fabric. It’s infrastructure for a world where powerful technologies are accessible, interoperable, and trustworthy by default. And that’s a vision worth caring about.