Kite launches mainnet with Kite Chain and Agent Passport

Kite announced the launch of its mainnet today, introducing a payments and settlement platform built for transactions initiated by autonomous AI agents. The release moves the project from testnet to a production environment intended for live agent-driven commerce.

The platform is organized in three layers. Kite Chain is a native settlement layer designed for price stability. The Kite Agent Passport is a core agent service that issues programmable wallets for agents. An Agent Interface & Experience layer supports agent registration, harnesses and service discovery for developers and agents.

The Kite Agent Passport lets an AI agent hold funds and make purchases on behalf of a user while the user sets spending limits and approved destinations. Kite described a use case where an agent inside Claude completes an online purchase, arranges shipping to the user’s address and is prevented from exceeding the user’s preset limits.

Kite Chain processes payments in digital dollars and connects to traditional banking systems, the company said. The platform is already integrated with more than 90 service providers and is intended to support multiple payment protocol standards, including the x402 payment standard, Google’s AP2 protocol, Stripe’s Machine Payment Protocol and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol.

Kite reported institutional steps accompanying the technical rollout. The company is a member of the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation and has raised $35 million in financing led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Pilot integrations with PayPal and Shopify are underway to extend Kite’s payments infrastructure into commerce environments.

Documentation and quick-start guides are available for developers and testers who want to integrate agents with the Passport and Chain. The Kite Agent Passport is available to try now.

In a statement, Chi Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Kite, called the launch ‘just the beginning’ and described the company’s goal of building infrastructure for agent-driven economies where agents operate with verified identity, programmable permissions and native settlement.