A best-in-class program for supporting builders on Ritual is now open. Apply here.
Intro
At Ritual, we have always held strong conviction that the intersection of crypto and AI will lead to both a reshaping of the existing design space of crypto applications and the creation of entirely new categories. We also believe that Ritual Chain will be the absolute best place to build these applications, which is why we’re excited to announce the launch of Ritual Altar, our full-stack program dedicated to supporting ambitious teams building applications at the intersection of crypto and AI from inception to beyond.
Building a New World
It’s no secret that infrastructure has continued to be one of the most popular categories in crypto. With a near infinite supply of new L1s/L2s, many of which offer differing promises around scalability or new execution environments or other improvements, crypto is anything but starved for blockspace.
But among this abundance of infrastructure, most that come to market are overwhelmingly underwhelming. Typically, this is due to a lack of novel applications, and thus, novel users. While infrastructure may unlock new narratives and new possibilities for developers, ultimately applications delivering new utility to users and retaining them is what matters.
We know that the quality of a chain is only as good as the quality of the applications built on it. We’ve seen this first hand. Ritual team members have:
- Worked at funds like Polychain, Paradigm, Dragonfly and a16z as investors and researchers, where we’ve helped structure rounds for core infrastructure like Eigenlayer, Celestia, Arbitrum and others, along with countless more application-layer protocols
- Built and raised millions for applications in DeFi, consumer, and more as founders and founding team members themselves
- Spent way too much time (and capital) interacting on-chain
In other words, we have built, invested in and most importantly been power users of infrastructure and applications across crypto ourselves. We understand new infrastructure promising new capabilities is only useful if applications can showcase these capabilities to users in novel product experiences. Ritual Chain is no exception to the rule.
On the Ritual Chain, developers will have access to a fully EVM-compatible environment while simultaneously enjoying chain-native access to a variety of AI/ML models. This means they’ll be able to call and use models from smart contracts, anywhere on the chain. This enables the creation of intelligent on-chain applications that inject models to enhance their feature set as well as net new protocols built around models themselves. We believe that this offers unprecedented functionality to builders on the chain, and allows for the creation of truly intelligent on-chain applications.
In addition to our expertise in building infrastructure and applications in crypto, our team has a deep background in AI and machine learning. Members have:
- Spearheaded research in applied AI/ML at Deepmind, Meta, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley
- Scaled AI/ML models at Palantir, Google, Citadel, and Jane Street
With Altar, we’ll be using our team’s full experience in crypto and AI to help builders explore and realize the incredible design space for applications at the intersection of these two categories.
Opening the Altar
Ritual Altar is designed to be comprehensive end-to-end support for teams that want to build applications on Ritual’s infrastructure. We aim to get applications from ideation to execution to mainnet as quickly as possible. Here’s what we offer to teams:
Product: Our team has significant experience building protocols and companies across crypto and AI and will work with Altar teams on the end-to-end of their product, from ideation to protocol design and development, to technical implementation. We’ll work closely with teams to incorporate and build features that make the best use of Ritual to offer entirely novel experiences and design choices to users to help their products stand out amongst the crowded crypto landscape.
Design: We’ve worked with some of the biggest protocols in the space on product design, and will be bringing our expertise directly to Altar teams. We’ll help Altar teams across the full range of their design requirements, from branding & copywriting, to pixel-perfect interface design, design system libraries and UI/UX feedback and improvements.
Engineering: Our team has world-class engineering experience across the stack, from frontend & smart-contract development support to building & productionizing containerized applications with composability & scalability in mind. Altar teams will have access to our engineers as they build out their product and integrate with Ritual.
Operations: We have a lot of experience in helping set up companies and related operations for both onshore and offshore setups, and will help Altar teams heavily shortcut all of the “behind-the-scenes” items that go into making an enduring company.
Go-to-Market (GTM) and Marketing: We will help Altar teams develop comprehensive GTM strategies that tap on our insights as operators and investors and get connected to relevant partnership opportunities. We have an extensive ecosystem of protocols and infrastructure across DeFi, consumer, infrastructure, and more building on top and with Ritual. We will help Altar teams with connecting with, integrating with and comarketing with these teams to accelerate their partnerships roadmap. We’ll also create and refine public facing content like blog posts and press releases, and engage in co-marketing to highlight them to the Ritual ecosystem and beyond to help grow their own communities.
Fundraising: Members of our team have worked at some of the largest funds in the space and have led and helped structure rounds for a multitude of projects as both institutional and angel investors. Ritual Altar teams will have full access to our expertise on how to craft a story, build a pitch deck, and construct a round, as well as our network of investors in the space.
Hiring: A company is only as good as its people; fortunately Ritual has access to a strong network of talent across both crypto and AI. Teams in Altar will gain access to this network, and we’ll further help you set up pipelines and efforts to hire for all your critical needs, from engineering to BD.
Mentorship: We’re supported by some of the best investors and advisors in the industry. Altar teams will have access to our network of operators, investors and researchers for feedback on their company throughout its entire life cycle.
There is no start and end date for Ritual Altar. Teams are welcome to apply anytime to work with us, and once we commit to start working with an Altar team, we will continue to support you as needed.
While Ritual Altar is primarily geared to early-stage teams, we are happy to work with teams at later stages. We welcome all builders that will build on Ritual Chain and are happy to help support them with Altar where it makes sense- regardless of where they are in their journey.
Most importantly, we want to ensure that we are working closely with teams to build quality protocols and companies.
Calling for Apostles
We have been alway committed to building Ritual and its ecosystem from the ground up with our community from day 1. Ritual Altar is our next big step in doing so.
Of course, no good call to build would be complete without a request for startups. We’ve come up with a few ideas that we’d like to see built on Ritual, but we’ve taken it one step further. We’ve gone ahead and prototyped a few of these ideas ourselves already, and would like to see teams take them all the way; you can find them here. Our current list spans DeFi, on-chain consumer games, and agentic interfaces for interacting on chain, but these are only the tip of the iceberg. We’ll continue to add to this list as we come up with and prototype more ideas. More importantly, these are by no means complete. They are templates for what we believe harness Ritual’s infrastructure to deliver interesting and valuable user experiences. Beyond these, we’re always open to any and all ideas and are happy to work with dedicated teams to ideate, refine and ultimately bring them to fruition.
Ready to become an Apostle and pioneer the next wave of crypto x AI applications? The application for Ritual Altar can be found here. You can also find our team members on Twitter and DM them anytime. We look forward to seeing you at the Altar.