Ritual opens AI-focused mainnet with 18% of token supply unlocked

Ritual said it opened its public mainnet on October 26, giving developers an EVM-compatible layer 1 built to call AI models, reach external services and schedule later work from smart contracts. The launch also makes 1.8 billion RITUAL tokens available, equal to 18% of the network’s stated 10 billion initial supply.

The live project site now directs developers to deploy applications, pay for execution in RITUAL and inspect network activity. Ritual’s deployment reference identifies the public network as chain ID 784. Those materials establish an available developer surface, but they do not establish meaningful application demand, recurring fee revenue or a decentralized governance system.

AI work is delegated, not replicated by every validator

Ritual’s distinguishing feature is a set of protocol-level interfaces for jobs that ordinary EVM contracts cannot execute alone. Its developer materials describe calls for language-model inference, HTTP requests, trusted execution environments, persistent agents and scheduled tasks. Applications can submit those jobs while retaining familiar EVM contract tooling.

That does not mean every validator runs a language model. Ritual says specialized “AI executors” perform model inference, HTTP calls and other compute inside trusted execution environments. Hardware attestation is intended to demonstrate that approved software ran, while users prepay for compute through an onchain RITUAL balance and executors receive payment after returning a result.

The trust model remains important. At launch, executors are admitted through attestation and an approved list, according to the foundation’s tokenomics disclosure. Trusted hardware and an allowlist are controls, not proof that all computations are permissionless or immune to implementation flaws. Ritual’s launch announcement describes the chain as supporting private and autonomous agents, but Coinburn found no independent production measurement showing how many such agents are active or how much inference work they have completed.

Launch supply and governance have explicit limits

Ritual Foundation says the initial supply is 10 billion tokens and has no maximum. At launch, 1.25 billion tokens from ecosystem growth and research, 500 million from the foundation treasury and 50 million for a community airdrop are unlocked. Together they total 1.8 billion, or 18% of the initial supply.

The remaining allocations are subject to different schedules. The foundation says all contributor, investor and treasury tokens held by insiders are locked for at least one year from the mainnet launch, while the final scheduled unlocks occur four years after launch. These are issuer disclosures rather than an independently reconciled onchain circulating-supply audit.

Supply can also change after launch. The network initially targets roughly 5% annualized issuance for staking rewards, subject to actual block times, and uses an EIP-1559 fee model that burns transaction base fees. Because issuance and burning move in opposite directions, the launch allocation alone cannot establish the future circulating supply or inflation rate.

Control is similarly transitional. For the first six months, the foundation and core developers say they will make protocol decisions while establishing a public proposal process. Validators must still choose to run upgrade software, but binding staker votes are targeted only after the first year. The foundation also retains unspecified administrative powers at launch, with a stated plan to disclose and transfer them over time.

Ritual has therefore shipped more than a concept page: it presents a public chain configuration, deployment path and explorer. The harder test begins after launch—whether third-party applications generate sustained use, whether executor verification works under production conditions and whether the promised transfer of governance authority occurs on schedule.