Origins Network has closed an $8 million strategic financing round to build a modular blockchain tailored for AI agents — a project that bets verifiable compute will become the trust layer for next‑generation autonomous systems. The fundraising, announced March 23, 2026, is led by Animoca Brands and includes TBV, Candaq, Castrum Istanbul and Coinvestor Ventures. Origins describes the cap table as a mix of Web3, AI and cloud‑native backers.
At the core of Origins’ design is a concept it calls Proof of Computation (PoC). Rather than running heavy AI inference on every full node — or forcing developers to rely on opaque centralized APIs — Origins will have GPU‑heavy model execution happen off‑chain on specialized infrastructure, then post succinct cryptographic proofs of that work to the chain. “We’re not trying to turn a blockchain into a data center,” the team says. “We’re turning blockchains into verifiers of AI behavior.”
Under PoC, AI agents submit workloads to an off‑chain execution layer — which can tap infrastructure from providers such as AWS, Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud — and then anchor cryptographic evidence of the computation on Origins’ chain. That approach lets dApps and users prove a model actually executed a given prompt or pipeline without requiring every node to re‑run expensive inference. Origins positions PoC as a middle path between centralized AI APIs and heavyweight “AI on L1” experiments that risk clogging general‑purpose blockchains.
The raise comes amid a broader wave of investment into modular AI blockchain infrastructure. In 2024, 0G Labs secured $35 million at pre‑seed to build a modular AI data‑availability layer, while more recent projects such as Hemi have attracted eight‑figure rounds to stitch Bitcoin and Ethereum into modular execution and settlement stacks. Origins aims to occupy a focused niche in that landscape: verifiable, agentic workloads.
Animoca Brands, the lead backer, brings deep Web3 provenance — more than 600 investments across gaming, NFTs and infrastructure. Its chairman Yat Siu has long pitched Web3’s promise as “digital property rights at internet scale.” Origins’ pitch aligns with that vision by making AI outputs auditable and, implicitly, more ownable and accountable than transient black‑box results. Animoca frames its bets as a push toward institutional‑grade transparency and utility tokens rather than speculative memecoins.
For crypto markets, the thesis is straightforward: if AI agents will soon manage portfolios, underwrite loans or execute trades on decentralized exchanges, their decisioning must be inspectable and contestable. Origins Network is positioning itself as the ledger that can verify — and therefore trust — autonomous AI behavior.
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