In the last few months, AI Agent registrations on Taiko have climbed enough that growthepie wrote it up, CoinMarketCap put us in the glossary and Artemis added us to the agentic commerce map. None of it was bought, which is the part you can't manufacture.
Here's the longer version. What we shipped, what's working, what's harder than we thought and what we're betting on for the rest of the year.
A year ago, "AI Agents will transact onchain at scale" was a thesis we had to defend. In the last few months, the data started defending it for us.
ERC-8004 is live on Taiko The open standard for AI Agent identity, reputation and validation, onchain, working in production. We didn't just adopt the spec. Taiko is one of the first places it actually runs.
Joaquin wrote the definition of AI Agents into the CoinMarketCap glossary. Yes, that one. The next time someone asks the internet what an AI Agent is, the answer starts with us. Mom, we made it.
growthepie flagged it in the data. Their EIP-8004 quick bite called out that AI registrations are picking up on Taiko. Not a forecast. Observed behaviour.
Artemis put us on the Agentic Commerce Market Map alongside 165 companies across 17 chains. Showing up on the maps that matter is a leading indicator, especially when the people drawing the map aren't on your payroll.
Four signals in four months, each one stacking on the last.
If you want a chain that AI Agents will actually use, the fastest way is to spend a few hours a week being the AI Agent. So we've been running weekly hackathons since early in the year. Every team member, from marketing through engineering, has shipped at least one AI Agent project.
The output is wide and weird in the right way:
Tax calculators
Agent dating sites
Oracles
A crypto media communications agent
Some are silly. Some are serious. All are functional. The individual products aren't the point. The point is that every person on the team has now built one, hit the walls in the infrastructure and brought back what we needed to fix or build to make the next one easier. We are using what we make.
Your next 1000 "developers" aren't developers. They're agents, and agents don't google, they query. So we rebuilt the content stack around how machines read, not how humans browse.
docs.taiko.xyz, rebuilt for agents. Every page now serves clean Markdown with one click. Your AI just got read access to our entire knowledge base. Do with that what you will.
Three AI Agent guides are live on the site, each available in Markdown so search engines and language models can ingest the source material directly, which is what AEO actually looks like in production:
A fourth guide, Why AI Agents need based rollups, is coming next.
Proving Ground is live. Our new publication at provinggroundxyz is where we document, in public, what we're building, testing and learning as we figure out how AI Agents actually work on blockchain infrastructure, with two posts a week landing every Tuesday and Thursday across three rotating formats. Experiments give first-person accounts from people building on Taiko, walking through the technical wall they hit, the design decision they made and the reasoning behind it. Analysis pieces zoom out to the bigger questions that surface when autonomous systems meet onchain infrastructure, while explainers break down specific concepts at the intersection of AI Agents and crypto, written to age well as reference long after the news cycle has moved on.
The name is deliberate, because a proving ground is rougher than a lab and closer to the field, where ideas, hypotheses and experiments get put through their paces, and if something works we say so, and if it doesn't we say that too. Taiko itself is a proving ground for AI Agents, and the publication is the record of what we find.
Shasta is running. Our next major protocol evolution went from roadmap to live in the same window we introduced it.
TaikoProofs went live at proofs.taiko.xyz. A real-time dashboard tracking ZK coverage, proof latency and batch finalization across every batch the chain produces. Inspired by Ethproofs. We target 100 percent ZK coverage and want to enforce it at the protocol level, and the dashboard shows the complete picture, including operational variation. Verification, not claims.
Sub-cent gas. Base fee dropped to 0.01 gwei. The average Taiko transaction now costs around $0.003. Cheaper than most L2s, in the same ballpark as ultra-low-fee chains like Solana and Polygon. Sub-cent gas gang.
Taiko × Interfold brought confidential coordination to the ecosystem. Onchain systems break when votes, bids or strategies leak before execution. The partnership opens a new pattern: private inputs, verifiable outcomes, no trusted operator in the middle.
Joaquin published an OpEd in Cointelegraph: Real-world assets don't need new gatekeepers. The argument is that tokenization done right doesn't need a permission layer dressed up as innovation, which lands differently when you remember that the next wave of holders for these assets won't be humans queueing at a KYC desk. It's the kind of position we're putting more weight behind, especially as AI Agents move closer to interacting with RWAs at scale.
On April 17 we held our third board meeting. We mention it not because board meetings are interesting, but because functioning governance is the kind of thing nobody notices until it isn't there.
The board reviewed administrative and legal matters, walked through the quarterly spending report and discussed Taiko's strategic direction. On the financial side, we're tracking against the spending plan approved in mid-2025, which is the kind of boring news that actually matters. On the strategic side, the board did what a good governance body should, bringing an external perspective and asking the questions that only surface when sharp people think hard about a protocol's direction.
The board: Prof. Felix, Prof. Wen Yonggang, Joy Lam (Clarient Advisory, Ex-Binance Head of Global Regulatory and APAC Legal), Terence Lam (representing Taiko Labs Limited) andDaniel Wang (Taiko DAOFoundation Supervisor).
The big internal news this year is that Gustavo Gonzalez is now CTO, with the title finally catching up to the work. He's been driving Shasta, TaikoProofs and the sub-cent gas drop, and he's now spearheading DeFi-Cli and Trusted Layers for AI Agents. The technical direction across Taiko sits with him from here.
For the full backstory on how the board came together, see Taiko DAO Appoints Three Heavyweight Board Directors and Advisor as Governance Goes Live from October.
The thesis is showing up in the data. The protocol keeps getting faster, cheaper and more legible to the audience we're building for. The publication is live. The board is engaged. The numbers are moving.
Heads down.
Taiko team
Get the latest from Taiko:
Website: https://taiko.xyz.
Proving Ground: https://provinggroundxyz.substack.com
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Community forum: https://community.taiko.xyz.