South Korea's Upbit locks 98% of its coins in cold wallets, setting a new industry security benchmark. But this only solves the question of "how to store" now there's a more exciting challenge ahead: when AI starts managing and spending money, how should the accounting be done?

This is about the recent launch of the Kite mainnet. This thing isn't built for human users; it's a dedicated financial infrastructure designed specifically for AI agents.

It sounds mysterious, but the logic is straightforward—existing blockchains are too "heavy" for AI. You might think a few cents in transaction fees doesn't matter, but if AI needs to perform hundreds of thousands of microtransactions daily, the costs become astronomical. Kite targets this pain point: transaction confirmation times under one second, with single-transaction costs below 0.001 cents. Developers don't need to start from scratch; it's EVM-compatible, so they can jump right in.

How is security handled? A three-layer identity design is quite clever. You hold the root key, which has the highest permission level; when granting access to an AI assistant, it gets its own independent identity and accumulates reputation points; for specific tasks, temporary keys are used and destroyed after use. What does this mean? You can let AI help pay your utility bills, but it cannot touch other assets in your wallet. Permissions are tightly controlled, allowing machines to truly gain "economic autonomy."

On the payment layer, it's even more aggressive. Kite bets on stablecoins + state channels, enabling AI to perform high-frequency microtransactions wildly. Imagine this scenario: your AI content assistant generates a piece of copy, and the payment is settled in real-time; your data scraper calls an API and automatically completes the payment—entirely without human intervention, machines settling their accounts themselves.

This isn't science fiction; it's an ongoing infrastructure revolution. When machines start having wallets and spending money, the game rules change.