Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of the Ritual Foundation, an independent organization dedicated to stewarding and accelerating the Ritual Chain and its broader ecosystem.

The current AI landscape is chaotic. Progress happens at light speed, but the space remains plagued by broken capital formation, centralization, censorship, and opacity. Crypto, as a technology, is a natural antithesis to these problems; crypto-native infrastructure, protocols, and applications are by nature decentralized, accessible, and transparent. At the Ritual Foundation, we believe building crypto-native technology that brings these properties to AI is critical for the future. The past year has seen experimentation in crypto at almost every layer of the AI stack (from data to training to inference) in an attempt to solve one or multiple of these issues. But very few are built on infrastructure suitable for AI-related tasks.

So how does the Ritual Foundation fit into this vision? The Foundation will serve as the steward for the Ritual Chain and related technologies. We are laser-focused on providing our community of builders with the technical, financial, and operational resources they need to supercharge building on Ritual and pushing forward meaningful advances in the crypto x AI design space. We have a lot of initiatives along these lines that will be announced soon, so stay tuned.

More importantly, we’re determined to build out a different kind of foundation. Historically, foundations have taken a more passive approach to ecosystem building and supporting their users largely through grants, marketing, and DevRel. Ritual Foundation’s goal is not just to effectively execute on what we know works but to also chart new territory. The Foundation will be investing the time and resources to make sure we have the best talent and resources to do everything from providing strategic capital to the community to prototyping, building, and incubating products on top of Ritual. In other words, we plan on being a lot more hands-on with the community, working alongside you to develop new directions for the ecosystem based on our own priors.

But we also envision the Foundation expanding beyond this. A lot of the same primitives that will make Ritual the best chain for AI also extend to other, entirely new categories that no other network today is able to service. The next generation of RaaS providers and one-click appchain launchers can now integrate heterogeneous compute with incentivized fee markets out of the box with Ritual Chain. The long standing problem around the decentralization of prover markets for dozens of chains in the space can now be tackled with our SOTA fee market mechanism. Lastly, native provenance primitives for models and their outputs enable IP marketplaces for generated content. Our goal as a Foundation, beyond crypto x AI, is to help accelerate the next generation of potential novel products enabled by the technology we steward.

To realize both our vision in crypto and AI and beyond, we’re committed to, and have already begun, getting the best talent onboard across not only typical BD/marketing functionalities but other equally important growth and product functionalities within the Ritual Foundation. We know that the future doesn’t just happen—it must be built. Ritual is no different. And if you’re reading this, you’re still early. We can’t wait to build the future with you.

If you’re ready to take this mission on with us and think you’ve got what it takes, join us. Make sure to follow for updates at @ritualfnd.