Project Research Dossier — Ritual

From attached source: message.txt

Project Research Dossier — Ritual Author: cuongisreal Date: 2 Oct 2026 Constraint check: no public raise found, no active ICO/TGE. A 1% Foundation Private Sale is disclosed on the tokenomics page. Testnet gas token is not a listed asset.

1. Goal Ritual is building a chain and platform for agents that can call models, schedule work, settle on-chain, and use attestation as a primitive. The stated problem is that frontier AI labs keep models behind permissioned APIs, so privacy, verification, and censorship resistance are missing. Source: https://ritual.net/vision and https://ritual.net/about

Why it matters for this exercise: the product claim is specific enough to falsify. Either agents can already do those calls on the public testnet, or the vision page is ahead of the network. A dossier that only repeats “decentralized AI” fails that test.

2. Tokenomics Primary source: https://tokenomics.ritualfoundation.org/ Total supply: 10,000,000,000 RITUAL. Core Contributors 29% (2.9B) Ecosystem Growth + R&D 25% (2.5B) Network Participation & Future Incentives 14% (1.4B) Labs Investors 11.3% (1.13B) Ritual Foundation 10% (1.0B) Labs Treasury 5% (0.5B) Frontier AI Grants 4.7% (0.47B) Foundation Private Sale 1% (0.1B)

FDV is not knowable. There is no public price and no circulating market. Any FDV in a thread is a guess.

Unlocked at Public Mainnet, per that page: 12.5% from Ecosystem, 5% from Foundation treasury, 0.5% airdrop. That is 18% of supply on day one if the page is executed as written. The other 82% is locked. Insider tokens, including contributors, labs investors, labs treasury, grants, and the private sale, have a minimum one-year lock from mainnet. Locked tokens cannot be staked. Staking rewards go only to unlocked supply.

Emissions: about 5% annualized at the start, paid to validators, AI executors, and delegators, meant to fall as fees rise. Base fee is burned on an EIP-1559 model. The 5% is “subject to empirical block times,” so it is not a fixed emission contract in this source.

3. Unlock and dilution Day 0 float is the 18% above, not the 0.5% airdrop alone. The Foundation’s 5% unlocked at launch is treasury, not community float. It can be used.

Month 12 is the first real cliff. Contributors, labs investors, labs treasury, grants, and the private sale start unlocking after the one-year lock. Investors: 50% of their allocation at month 12, then monthly through month 24. Private sale: locked year one, then linear through month 24. Contributors: locked year one, then a partial unlock at month 12 and monthly after that. The page’s contributor sentence is internally loose on whether 50% or 33% unlocks at the one-year mark. That ambiguity is a diligence finding, not a rounding error.

Month 15: the remaining 13.5% of Network Participation leaves its lock and unlocks monthly through month 48. Month 48: final tokens unlock. Ecosystem’s locked half also vests monthly over four years.

Dilution risk is back-loaded, not absent. A reader who stops at “one-year cliff” misses the 18% already free at launch and the treasury slice inside it.

4. Team verification vs marketing Verifiable from primary pages: product intent, research tracks (AI, mechanism design, systems, cryptography), and a published allocation table. Not verifiable here: named audit of the chain or token contracts, GitHub commit mapping to the vision claims, mainnet date, public price. The tokenomics page links docs (https://docs.ritualfoundation.org) and does not link an audit report. No audit in the source means no audit claim in this dossier. Marketing to treat as unverified: “fully verifiable” and “privacy first” on the about page. Those are design goals until a proof system and a TEE threat model are specified in a report a third party can read.

5. Risks Technical: heterogeneous AI execution plus TEE privacy is a wide trust surface. A TEE compromise or a prover bug breaks the “guaranteed results” line. Execution: public mainnet is still a future event in the tokenomics post. Testnet RITUAL is faucet gas, not the asset in the allocation table. Governance: 29% contributors plus 11.3% labs investors plus 5% labs treasury is 45.3% insider-controlled supply, locked but concentrated. Legal: a token that pays for compute and staking, with a private sale already on the books, can be argued over as a security depending on jurisdiction. This dossier does not resolve that. Airdrop: 50M tokens, 0.5%, for Infernet nodes, Frenrug, and Discord/ambassador work. Sybil pruning is claimed. The claim is only as good as the unpublished filter.

6. Disclosure No position. No allocation. This note is Republic campaign research for participation review, not a recommendation to buy. There is nothing to buy in the primary sources: no active public sale, no TGE date on the tokenomics page.