Building Agentic Payments @GoKiteAI, ex-@Databricks, PhD @UCBerkeley, @UWaterloo Alum
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Chi Zhang retweeted
Here's what OpenAI's agentic software factory looks like, today.
Details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
(thanks to all the OpenAI folks who explained how it works! And Perf Factory looks especially interesting to me)
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Kite is now live on @arc
Kite is now live on @Arc Mainnet, building the foundation for an agent-to-agent platform with trust, governance and USDC payments.
The future of the agentic economy is here.
Arc Mainnet: arc.io/
Kite Agent Passport: agentpassport.ai/
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Kite is now live on @Arc Mainnet, building the foundation for an agent-to-agent platform with trust, governance and USDC payments.
The future of the agentic economy is here.
Arc Mainnet: arc.io/
Kite Agent Passport: agentpassport.ai/
Arc Mainnet is live.
Arc launches as the Economic OS for the internet: an open platform for global markets, real-time value movement, tokenized assets, and agentic economic activity.
Arc is more than a blockchain.
It launches as a full-stack financial platform with assets, applications, interoperability, developer infrastructure, and Circle platform services live from day one.
Arc delivers USDC as native gas, deterministic sub-second finality, EVM compatibility, and institutional validators.
It integrates with Arc Studio, App Kits, Arc Portal, Circle Agent Stack, CCTP, Gateway, CPN, and StableFX.
A complete economic platform at genesis.
Arc launches with infrastructure for:
→ Agentic economic workflows
→ Lending and borrowing
→ Trading and liquidity
→ Onchain FX
→ Payments and settlement
→ Tokenized assets
→ Exchanges, wallets, custody, compliance, data, and developer tooling
190+ institutional and ecosystem builders are building across Arc.
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When AI agents transact on our behalf, how should payments, identity, and trust work?
Our co-founder and CEO @ChiZhangData will join Agentic Finance, Commerce & Payments alongside:
▷ Siwei Shen | VP of Engineering, AI & Data, @coinbase
▷ Katia Gazquez Rausch | Agentic Commerce Strategy Manager, @Adyen
▷ Alex Witt @AlexLWitt | General Partner, @VerdaVentures
▷ ZiYang David Fan | Executive Director, Institute for California AI Policy (ICAP)
▷ Jeff Zielinski | CFO, Buy&Ship
▷ Leo Yiyang Li @alohaleonardox | Co-founder & CTO, AEON Protocol @AEON_Community
▷ Rufei Qian | CEO, @NihaoPay
The discussion will explore payment, identity, and settlement infrastructure for agents, the role of stablecoins in agentic commerce, and financial use cases seeing real adoption.
@GoKiteAI is an event partner. Hosted by Fintechnize and presented by @VerdaVentures.
September 24, 2026 | 6:00 to 8:00 PM PT
Stanford Graduate School of Business @StanfordGSB
Register: luma.com/pjqtgcx3
See you at Stanford. 🪁
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Before agents negotiate, their authority needs to be defined.
Chapter 9 of THE AGENT PLAYBOOK explores why smarter models alone are not enough, and how enforceable mandates let agents negotiate within their owners’ limits. 🪁
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On September 1 at the Google Web3 AI Summit 2026 in Sunnyvale, hosted by @googlecloud and @GoogleDeepMind, our co-founder and CEO @ChiZhangData will join a speaker lineup featuring leaders from @ethereumfndn, @circle, @chainlink, @Consensys, @coinbase, @a16zcrypto, and more.
As AI agents become economic actors, Chi will share Kite’s perspective on the identity, authorization, and payment infrastructure they need to act and transact safely at scale.
Event details:
rsvp.withgoogle.com/events/g…
The agent economy is becoming real. Infrastructure has to come first. 🪁
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An agent that pays rush pricing for every call is not autonomous. It is just an expensive script.
DeepSeek’s move to peak and off-peak pricing is the latest signal. Across frontier labs, speed, batching, caching, and even where inference runs already carry different prices. One token, one price is ending.
The next benchmark is not intelligence per dollar. It is whether an agent can decide which work deserves urgency and which can wait.
That is why we incubated @MarathonBuild at @GoKiteAI: to turn urgency from a provider default into an agent-owned economic decision. 🪁
Same model. Up to 65% less.
DeepSeek’s new API prices take effect on August 16. Marathon lets latency-tolerant workloads trade wait time for lower inference costs without switching models.
▷ Choose NOW when every second matters.
▷ Choose SOON or LATER when a few minutes are acceptable.
▷ Choose ANYTIME for deferrable work, with savings up to 65%.
Not every task needs an instant answer. Not every task should pay the instant price.
Pick your window: marathon.build
Savings are live estimates and vary with capacity. The final price is shown when you submit the request.
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🔺 Excited to be speaking at @avax Summit 2026 in NYC this September.
Looking forward to conversations around onchain finance, consumer apps, and what payments look like when AI agents are the ones transacting. That's the problem we're building @GoKiteAI for.
📍 Chelsea Industrial
📅 Sept 16-17
🔗 avalanchesummit.com
See you there 👋
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Identity is the very beginning of an agentic workflow. Payment is the very end. If the middle does not work, neither of them gets real adoption.
On @Vishwa_lab's Hubble podcast, Vishwa Co-Founder @nathan_sj_stem asked our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData a direct question: once you know who an agent is, is identity enough? Her answer was no.
▷ Six months of wake-up moments. What we believed at the start was not wrong, but on its own it was never going to solve a customer's problem. That holds for identity, and it holds for payments too.
▷ In consumer use cases, the devil is in the details. Sit with customers on shopping or travel booking and you find they never even reach the payment step. They cannot find the right product in the first place.
▷ Developers are where the opening is right now. Claude Code and other coding agents solved the building part. Deployment, credential management, and paying per API call are still unattended.
▷ That gap is ours to close as well. Before developers really adopt Kite Passport, we have to build the middle they are missing.
Adoption is not decided at either end. It is decided in the middle. 🪁
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Every mature market prices time. Overnight or ground, peak or off-peak. Inference somehow never did. One speed, one price, because there was always a person waiting on the other end.
Agents changed that. They run for hours, and most of the time nobody's sitting there watching.
That's what @MarathonBuild does, incubated by our team at @GoKiteAI. The agent picks how long a job can wait, and the price moves with it. Up to ~65% off if it can wait a while.
The savings are nice. What I keep coming back to is that an agent choosing to wait is making an economic call. We've been building identity and payments so agents can prove who they are and settle on their own. Knowing what's worth spending and when is the piece that makes them actual economic actors.
Been waiting to see this one ship. 🪁
Introducing Marathon: adaptive inference infrastructure for long-running agents, powered by @GoKiteAI.
Run your agents at significantly lower cost, without sacrificing model quality.
How it works:
Install our one-line plugin for Codex or Claude Code, then choose a completion window per request: now, soon, later, or anytime. The more you’re willing to wait, the more you save, up to ~65% off.
Launching with support for the top five open-weight models, from @Kimi_Moonshot, @Zai_org, @deepseek_ai, @Alibaba_Qwen, and @nvidia.
Try Marathon today: marathon.build/
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Chi Zhang retweeted
Chi Zhang, Kite AI Co-Founder & CEO on Building Agentic Internet nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1NGarrBXX…
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Once again, someone is impersonating me on Telegram (using the name “Chi Zhang | Kite AI”) and messaging people. Please don’t reply, click any links, or share personal info if you get a message like this. Just ignore/block. DO NOT INTERACT!
PS: my actual TG handle is safe, so normal chats are all good.
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The model-swap identity paradox is one of the most underappreciated problem in agent infra right now. Most teams handwave it because their "agents" are just demos with fixed backends.
Real production systems need cryptographic continuity: same public key, evolving capabilities, auditable provenance chain. Otherwise you can't enforce spend caps, session keys, or SLA-backed contracts.
Agent identity without continuous attestation is just a vanity NFT.
nitter.net/GoKiteAI/status/206943…
What actually makes an agent an agent? It might be less stable than you think.
At @proofoftalk inside the Louvre in Paris, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData unpacked Personhood, Provenance, and Verification in the Agentic Age, alongside leaders from @billions_ntwk, @paritytech, and @SuremarkDigital, moderated by @animocabrands.
In this clip, Chi breaks down why agent identity is harder than it looks:
▷ An agent is technically just a wrapper on top of a foundation model. So if the model swaps from GPT-4.5 to GPT-5.5, are you still using the same agent, or does the identity have to change when the brain underneath does?
▷ Identity is not one thing. It is layered: from the human level, to the agent level, to the task scope level, and verification has to hold at each one.
▷ This is the layer Kite is building. Through Agent Passport, every agent carries a verifiable identity you can define and control.
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The agent economy will not start with shopping. It starts with APIs.
On Episode 742 of the @BlockHashPod, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData sat down with host Brandon Zemp to unpack why Kite's adoption thesis flipped within one year:
▷ Our first demo was agents ordering Uber Eats. Today the nearest-term use case is the API economy: agents paying per call, in real time, for the services they consume
▷ If the world ends up with more agents than humans, the whole world needs to be API accessible. That is how agents work with each other
▷ Adoption will run from developers to enterprises to consumers. Exactly the opposite of what we expected a year ago
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AI on Air Ep.17: Hashed on Korea’s Agent Finance Moment nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1mGPaaRWq…
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When AI agents do the shopping, your most important customer might not be a human at all.
On @jeffwilser's @AiCuriousHQ podcast, our Co-Founder & CEO @ChiZhangData unpacked where agentic commerce actually stands today, and why it's arriving faster than most people expect.
▷ The shift is structural: when agents buy on your behalf, businesses start selling to agents, not people. If an agent can't discover you, you're invisible.
▷ It's already a one-way ticket: Shopify first blocked agents, then opened its catalog to them. Visa, Mastercard and Google are all moving in.
▷ The hard part isn't the checkout, it's trust and payments. Kite is the layer that lets your agent pay safely, without ever handing over your credit card.
"Agentic commerce is coming sooner than people think."
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Chi Zhang retweeted
"Agentic commerce is coming sooner than people think."
That's @GoKiteAI CEO @ChiZhangData on the new episode of @AiCuriousHQ.
I hosted the AI Summit at @consensus2026 this year--Agentic Commerce was our core theme. It used to feel abstract.
Now it's getting real.
Link ⤵️
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