Ben Perszyk (❖,❖)

The next generation of onchain AI starts today. Ritual mainnet is live, and so is $RITUAL. You can build agents that hold their own keys, earn revenue and pay for their own compute. Network details, tokenomics and how to get started below.

Today’s topic for DevRel Office Hours is the “The Empty Path” 🧵 2 weeks ago we gave builders one piece of homework: test what happens when nothing comes back. Today it comes due, and the Verify Challenge closes with it.

In November 2023 we ran an onchain AI agent managing $30,000. We were early to onchain agents, and we’re early to agentic institutions. This year, six papers took a first shot at building a fully agentic company. All six did it offchain, by hand. If you strip them down, the same four requirements keep showing up: an identity the agent owns, memory that outlives the process, a budget that can actually run out, and work a third party can verify. On Ritual, all four are native to the chain. Let the Ritual begin.

Four questions every Ritual callback should ask. 🧵 When your contract asks an AI model or a service for something, the answer comes back later. At Office Hours we drew the whole lesson as one picture: every answer, or non-answer, takes the same walk. Here it is.

Compute is the next global market without a unified platform to host it. The pieces to build it are here.

Spain's data regulator published its first breach report tied to an AI agent on September 15. It named no company, product, or cause. It named where to look: prompts, logs, conversation histories, agent memory. Memory is now a reportable surface.  cypro.co.uk/insights/cyber-b…

On September 4, an oracle on Starknet briefly reported USDT at about $2.04, and Vesu liquidated 47 positions in the next 109 seconds. Pragma published its post-mortem on September 14. The data flowed exactly as designed and the delivered number was still wrong.

Your next onchain user may already have a passkey. On September 10, Google announced easier passkey transfers between password managers on Android. For Ritual builders, that opens a useful design question: what should a familiar sign-in unlock?

Not every onchain model needs to be an LLM. The next generation of onchain AI won’t be one giant model doing everything. It’ll be a stack of purpose-built models, primitives, and agents, where each is used where it makes sense.

OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Astra on September 3. On the same day, Tenable announced plans to use OpenAI's GPT cyber models to inspect community-built agents and skills. The shared lesson for builders is that model capability is only part of agent trust.

Builder tip 🛠️ Ask most coding agents for a Ritual dApp and they'll write Ethereum code, but Ethereum assumptions break here. The ritual-dapp-overview skill is the fix: it corrects your agent's priors before it scaffolds anything. Your first dApp, in 5 posts 🧵

100M+ agentic payments have already settled onchain. The agent economy is valid and operational. So what does a chain built for machine agency actually look like? A map of Ritual, in 6 posts 🧵