Introducing AgentFlux, a Privacy-Preserving AI Framework for Onchain Finance
New open-source framework keeps keys, strategies and client data on-device, paving the way for institutional onchain strategies powered by AI
NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Axelar, the Gateway to Onchain Finance, today announces the release of AgentFlux, a new open-source framework for privacy-preserving, on-device agentic AI. Built to run powerful AI agents locally on consumer-grade or enterprise hardware, AgentFlux is designed to help institutions bring agentic automation into their onchain financial stacks without sending private keys, trading strategies or sensitive client data to the cloud.
Incubated at Interop Labs, the initial developer of the Axelar network, in collaboration with researchers behind the AgentFlux research paper, the project is being launched as a free software package. A reference trading demo, built on Ethereum using a Coinbase tool-calling environment, showcases an end-to-end, AI-driven onchain trading workflow.
The research paper is co-authored by Axelar co-founder Sergey Gorbunov and collaborators Rohan Kadekodi, Zhan Jin, Keisuke Kamahori, Yile Gu and Baris Kasikci of University of Washington, Sean Khatiri and Noah H. Bayindirli of Interop labs.
Agents, blockchains and the privacy gap
As institutions experiment with AI-driven trading, portfolio operations and reporting, agents are rapidly becoming a new layer in the financial technology stack. In blockchain ecosystems, that creates a fundamental tension. With cloud-based agents in the loop, cryptographic material, prompts and contextual data would be sent to remote infrastructure, undermining both the cryptographic guarantees and the privacy properties that drew many participants to blockchains in the first place.
"Interacting with blockchains is inherently complex, and agents are here to abstract that complexity away," said Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar and co-author of the AgentFlux paper. "But if agents require you to ship keys, trading strategies and client context to the cloud, you've broken the core promise of self-custody and privacy that blockchains were built on. AgentFlux is about restoring those guarantees in an agent-native world: the agent runs where your keys live."
A new architecture for on-device agentic AI
AgentFlux introduces a framework in which the most sensitive parts of agentic workloads: reasoning, tool orchestration and context handling, run fully on-device, while heavier, non-sensitive workloads can be selectively delegated to external services when needed.
"AgentFlux shows that you don't need to ship every token to a frontier cloud model just to orchestrate tools correctly," said Rohan Kadekodi, lead author of the AgentFlux paper. "By splitting the problem into classification and argument generation, and giving each its own optimized adapter, we can run agents locally that behave much more like top-tier cloud systems, without exposing sensitive data."
Built for institutional DeFi and Axelar's multichain rails
For global institutions exploring onchain finance, privacy, data residency and key custody are not optional. Trading strategies, client portfolios and compliance workflows often span both traditional financial systems and multiple blockchains; any AI system that touches them must respect strict internal controls and regulatory expectations.
AgentFlux is designed with these constraints in mind. Sensitive workloads and cryptographic material remain on-device or within institution-controlled environments, while the framework allows carefully scoped interactions with external tools and models when necessary. Only anonymized or aggregate outputs need to leave the local environment.
By pairing AgentFlux with Axelar, institutions can extend these private, agent-driven workflows across systems.
"Institutions don't want a different agent for every chain or every venue; they want a single, governed agent that can see their exposure, reason about risk and act across the entire onchain universe," Gorbunov said. "Axelar provides the multichain rails; AgentFlux provides the privacy-preserving brain that can sit inside an institution's perimeter. Together, they form a blueprint for how onchain finance will actually operate at scale."
Accessing AgentFlux
- Explore the AgentFlux landing page for an overview of the architecture, demo and motivating use cases.
- Read the full AgentFlux research paper for technical details on decoupled fine-tuning, LoRA adapters and benchmark results.
- Visit the AgentFlux GitHub repository to review the code, run the trading demo and fork the framework for custom deployments.
"We see AgentFlux as a starting point, not a finished product," said Gorbunov. "Our goal is to give the community a solid, research-backed framework and a live demo that proves what's possible. From there, we want developers and institutions to take it in directions we haven't even imagined yet."
About Axelar
Axelar is the Gateway to Onchain Finance, a decentralized network and development platform securely connecting the world's blockchains and financial institutions, developed by Interop Labs and other contributors. Its configurable technology stack enables seamless tokenization, yield and trading products critical for the next wave of institutional-grade use cases.
Alongside partners including top-tier institutions such as Deutsche Bank, Mastercard and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Axelar is developing the next generation of financial infrastructure: from global stablecoins to tokenized funds, built with security, compliance and enterprise scale in mind.
For more information, visit axelar.network and the AgentFlux project page.
Media Contact:
Sam Shillet, AVP, Ditto PR
Sam@dittopr.co
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SOURCE Axelar