Ritual Launches an AI-Native Layer 1 With 18% of Its Token Supply Unlocked

Frank Joaquin

Date: October 29, 2026

Ritual has launched its public mainnet and native RITUAL token, moving from an AI oracle network and testnet into a live EVM-compatible Layer 1. The chain is designed to give applications native access to model inference, external services, scheduling, private computation and agent-controlled wallets.

The Ritual Foundation launch post says more than 2,000 agents generated over 90 million testnet transactions before mainnet. Those are project-reported test metrics, not proof of paid production demand. The meaningful post-launch measurements will be active developers, paid inference, fees, validator concentration and recurring applications. Ritual Foundation

The published tokenomics identify an initial supply of 10 billion RITUAL with no maximum supply. About 1.8 billion tokens, or 18%, were unlocked at launch. Core contributors receive 29%, ecosystem growth and research 25%, future participation incentives 14%, investors 11.3%, the Foundation 10%, the Labs treasury 5%, AI grants 4.7% and a Foundation private sale 1%.

Initial issuance is targeted near 5% annually and may decline as fee revenue grows. Base transaction fees are burned under an EIP-1559 model. Contributor and investor allocations are locked for at least one year, while the 50 million-token community airdrop was fully unlocked at launch.

Ritual was founded by Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, both former Polychain Capital investors. The company announced a $25 million financing led by Archetype in 2023 and later added Polychain as a strategic investor. RITUAL-USD reached full trading on Coinbase Exchange and Coinbase Advanced on 27 October, as confirmed by the Coinbase status page.

TOKEN RECON ASSESSMENT

Ritual clears the New Project Recon threshold because the chain, token, team, funding, documentation and exchange markets are independently identifiable. It does not yet clear the product-market-fit threshold. An uncapped token with 18% available at launch creates a substantial initial float, and the 5% issuance target makes fee demand important. The project becomes more than an AI narrative if mainnet data show paid inference, durable agent activity and developers choosing its native capabilities over ordinary smart contracts connected to centralized APIs.