Kite, a blockchain-meets-AI project, said Saturday that it was turning on the Ethereum-compatible main network while releasing a new system, Passport, that lets AI agents pay and spend on a user's behalf.
Passport "combines agent identity, user authentication, delegated access, and agent-specific guardrails with a robust, agent-centric payment system," the Kite team said in a separate post on Medium. "It gives users control over how agents spend, without having to approve every transaction. With one line of code, agents unlock the ability to transact autonomously."
According to the post, a user could set up the agent on Passport and then prompt it to, "Buy me snacks on Amazon under $25.”
The Kite team announced last September that it had raised $18 million in funding, bringing total funding to $33 million.
Chi Zhang, co-founder and CEO, has a Ph.D. in statistics from University of California, Berkeley. Chief Technology Officer Scott Shi previously worked on AI at Uber and was a founding engineer on Salesforce Einstein AI.
In October, the project announced an additional investment from Coinbase Ventures, without disclosing the amount. According to a Medium post at the time, Kite is natively integrated with the x402 agentic payment standard, which was incubated by Coinbase.