AI Payments Startup Kite Debuts Token With $263M Trading Volume in First Two Hours

Kite, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered payments blockchain, rolled out its native token on Monday, generating significant trading volume on South Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb.

The token debuted with strong market activity on the whole, reaching a $159 million market capitalization and an $883 million fully diluted valuation (FDV) within its first few hours of trading, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Trading volume on Binance topped $85 million with a similar figure being achieved on Upbit and Bithumb, total volume stood at $263 million at press time.

The launch follows Kite’s $18 million Series A raise in September, which brought its total funding to $33 million. The round was aimed at accelerating the development of Kite’s base layer for AI-driven payments and autonomous agent systems.

Kite’s native token underpins its “agentic economy, serving as the medium for payments, staking, and governance across its blockchain network. It enables machine-to-machine and agent-to-agent transactions, allowing autonomous AI agents to execute payments, access data, and purchase compute resources.

Total supply of the token is capped at 10 billion, with 48% being allocated to the community, 12% to investors and 20% to the team and early contributors, according to Kite’s whitepaper.