Network Highlight: Kalypso by Marlin
Kalypso by Marlin is now live on Symbiotic mainnet, introducing a groundbreaking solution for trust-minimzed AI agent verification. Through Symbiotic's flexible shared security framework, Kalypso dramatically reduces the gas costs of verifying Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) attestations, making verified AI agents economically viable for the first time.
Transforming AI Agent Verification
AI agents are becoming increasingly prevalent in DeFi and onchain governance, but a critical challenge remains: how can we trust their computations? While TEEs like AWS Nitro Enclaves provide hardware-level isolation for running AI agents securely, verifying their attestation certificates onchain has been prohibitively expensive, costing around 75M gas per verification.
Kalypso solves this through an innovative approach. Instead of verifying attestation certificates directly, it generates zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs of the attestation. Verifying these ZK proofs costs only 300K gas, a 200x reduction that makes trust-minimized AI agent verification economically feasible onchain.
Decentralized Verification Market
Kalypso creates a two-sided marketplace connecting proof requestors (developers, AI agents, DAOs) with proof generators (participants with hardware like GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs). By decentralizing proof generation through Symbiotic's shared security primitives, Kalypso ensures both efficiency and reliability.
The marketplace uses Marlin TEEs to manage low-latency order matching while securely handling sensitive data and accommodating proof request preferences. This integration enables any protocol to quickly leverage proofs without compromise, while Marlin TEEs ensure the confidentiality of private inputs. Symbiotic vaults ensure reliability and effective proof generation through slashing mechanisms.
Beyond Traditional Security
What makes Kalypso particularly notable is their novel implementation of Symbiotic's slashing capabilities. By combining slashing with strong economic incentives through multi-asset restaking (including stETH, wBTC, and POND), Kalypso creates robust accountability for proof generators while maintaining capital efficiency.
Their marketplace demonstrates how Symbiotic's flexible architecture can secure complex verification networks without sacrificing decentralization or performance. The modular design allows Kalypso to evolve their security parameters over time while maintaining complete sovereignty over their implementation.
Immediate Impact
With AI verification now practical, developers can deploy AI agents with cryptographic guarantees of their behavior. Rather than paying massive gas fees to verify TEE attestations directly onchain, they can leverage Kalypso's ZK proof system for the same security guarantees at a fraction of the cost.
For users, this means greater confidence in AI-driven crypto systems, backed by hardware-level security and economic incentives. The dramatic reduction in verification costs opens up new use cases in DeFi, governance, and beyond where verified AI agents were previously impractical.
Looking Forward
Kalypso's launch demonstrates how Symbiotic's permissionless shared security can transform previously intractable problems through flexible implementation and strong economic alignment. As AI continues to expand into web3, having practical ways to verify agent behavior becomes increasingly crucial.
Through innovations like this, we're seeing how shared security extends far beyond simple use cases. Symbiotic provides the foundations for networks to build sophisticated verification systems, complex economic models, and novel security approaches, all while maintaining complete control over their implementation. Learn more about Kalypso via their docs and follow them on X.
Whether you're building AI-driven protocols, decentralized verification networks, or other systems requiring robust economic security, Symbiotic offers the flexibility to implement effective shared security in an entirely permissionless manner.
If you are interested in learning more or collaborating with Symbiotic, reach out to us here.