Ant Group Unveils Agentic Contract: Enhancing Blockchain Smart Contracts

At the 2025 Inclusion·Bund Conference Token Economy Forum, Ant Digital Technologies unveiled its “Agentic Contract,” a next-generation upgrade to smart contracts designed for native deployment on its new Layer2 blockchain, Jovay. This announcement signals a potentially transformative shift from pre-programmed automation to autonomous, AI-driven decision-making within blockchain technology.

Smart contracts, the foundational building blocks of blockchain networks, are typically defined as automated executioners of pre-set rules: “If condition A is met, then execute action B.” Ant Digital contends that current smart contracts, while swift, lack the environmental awareness, reasoning capabilities, and adaptability required for complex or unforeseen scenarios. This limitation restricts their ability to handle real-world applications that require dynamic decision-making.

The Agentic Contract aims to revolutionize this paradigm by integrating AI agents directly into the smart contract framework. These agents imbue the contracts with autonomy, allowing them to perceive their environment, engage in logical reasoning, and make dynamic decisions – fundamentally evolving them from basic “Smart Contracts” into sophisticated “Agentic Contracts.” For instance, in a supply chain context, an AI agent could analyze real-time logistics data to autonomously trigger freight payments via smart contract execution. In the energy sector, these agents could dynamically optimize revenue distribution from energy assets based on fluctuating market conditions.

According to Ant Digital, this AI-driven autonomy will enable assets to flow more freely, creating a globally interconnected and intelligently optimized value internet. This development marks a significant step forward for Ant Digital’s decade-long blockchain research, representing a strategic shift from “reliable connectivity” to “intelligent drive.” This transition is underpinned by the increasing sophistication of AI and its potential to handle complex decision-making processes, which are traditionally managed manually.

Tracing Ant Digital’s Web3 journey, from initial code development to the launch of the world’s first blockchain-based cross-border remittance system in 2018, and its continued investment in foundational technologies like cross-chain infrastructure, storage, and networking, the company emphasizes the importance of “serving real value” as its core principle driving blockchain development. This long term commitment to solving real-world problems, rather than chasing speculative trends, has set Ant Digital apart in a crowded field.

Over the past year, Ant Digital has collaborated with companies such as Lanxum, GCL, and ORE to tokenize real-world assets (RWAs) like new energy resources and computing power, facilitating on-chain circulation. Ant Digital envisions a future where asset tokenization becomes mainstream. The Agentic Contract is expected to accelerate this process, facilitating an intelligent restructuring of the global asset network.

Addressing concerns about trust and reliability in AI-driven contracts, Ant Digital highlights the crucial role of “verifiability.” The company emphasizes that AI reasoning processes, including decision-making criteria, data sources, and computational paths, must operate on verifiable computing engines. To this end, Ant Digital offers both Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) options to suit various performance demands and trust root selections, ensuring that enhanced intelligence does not compromise the fundamental trust that blockchain provides. Their composable architecture, comprising a general-purpose zkVM and custom zk circuits, supports both low-code development and deep optimization and acceleration for sophisticated AI reasoning scenarios. Combining the security and immutability of a blockchain with advanced inference techniques could open doors for Web3 applications like algorithmic stablecoins, decentralized identity schemes, and more complex supply chain management.

Ant Digital posits that Web3+AI represents more than just technological advancement; it heralds the emergence of a new era of intelligent agreements. Open collaboration and ecosystem co-creation are deemed central to realizing this vision. Ant Digital plans to continue sharing its technological advancements with global developers through platforms like AntChain Open Labs and ZAN.