Talus Network Receives Investment from Sui and Walrus to Accelerate Prediction AI
Los Angeles, California, September 29th, 2025, Chainwire
Talus Network has secured over $10M in funding, with new strategic backing from Sui and Walrus alongside blue-chip investors like Polychain Capital. With the upcoming launch of its $US network token, Talus is fusing AI and Prediction Markets to usher in the era of Prediction AI.
Talus Network, the infrastructure layer for decentralized AI agents and the creators of Prediction AI, today announced a strategic investment from both the Sui Foundation and Walrus Foundation. This investment reinforces Talus’ position as a category-defining project at the intersection of AI and prediction markets. Along with its two previous investment rounds led by Polychain, this brings Talus’ total amount raised to over $10 million. Also this month, idol.fun public testnet went live and Talus released its litepaper, which included the tokenomics for the Talus Network token $US.
The strategic investments and Talus Network’s integration with Sui underscore a shared vision between the three organizations: building powerful infrastructure that enables new and exciting consumer applications. The Sui and Walrus Foundations’ investment will accelerate development of Prediction AI and Agent vs Agent (“AvA”) Prediction Markets, a new paradigm in entertainment where AI agents compete in structured contests and users speculate on outcomes in prediction markets.
Prediction AI: AI Agents Compete, Humans Predict
Talus’ flagship application is Idol.fun, a consumer platform where users launch AI agents to compete against each other in structured AvA games and make predictions on the outcomes of these games in prediction markets. The direct integration of agent competitions with prediction markets introduces a new way for humans to earn directly from AI-driven events: Prediction AI.
“Prediction AI combines all the elements that drive successful consumer applications,” says Ben Frigon, Co-Founder and CSO of Talus. “AI gives us unlimited, low-cost methods to capture human attention, and prediction markets are the business structure which formalizes and monetizes human attention. If you’re paying attention to an event, you should be able to make money on it, and a lot of people will be paying attention to AI agents.”
The Talus Network testnet debuted last week with Idol Agents, AI-driven personalities designed to compete in AvA Games. In the interactive Idol Agent Contests, users submit influencer tweets, choose from agent-generated replies, and win if the influencer responds. This testnet preview leads into the Q1 2026 launch of the full Idol.fun platform.
The Nexus Framework and the full Sui Stack
The Talus team has developed Nexus, a novel framework for developers to create truly decentralized AI agents. While Sui serves as the global coordination layer, Walrus plays a critical role as the data layer to ensure the transparency and auditability of outcomes, and Sui Nautilus powers verifiable offchain inferences.
Nexus allows for agentic workflows to be hosted and defined completely onchain. Inferences can then be generated by offchain models and relayed to the chain by the Nexus leader node, an orchestrator that will at first be maintained by Talus and will later be decentralized in future Nexus upgrades to allow for permissionless orchestration.
By expressing all workflows onchain, Talus Agents receive three distinct benefits: censorship-resistance, transparency, and composability with other Sui onchain programs. Talus Network and the Nexus framework are uniquely enabled by utilizing Sui as a fullstack solution. All Nexus workflows live on Sui mainnet, expressed as DAG workflows, with execution occurring entirely onchain. Talus chose to build on Sui for its technical superiority, particularly for Sui Move, the object-centric programming language, and Mysteceti consensus, which enables an industry-leading transaction time to finality.
“Whenever we promote the benefits of a Talus Agent compared to what other agents offer, we are also promoting what Sui offers over every other chain,” says Michael Hanono, CEO and Co-Founder of Talus. “We conducted heavy research into the different partners we could take on to create Talus Network and concluded that the best construction to create the most powerful applications would be to integrate Nexus infrastructure with Sui’s extensive product suite. The Mysten team has been of extraordinary help in every step of our journey to build Talus Network.”
“I’m proud to say I’ve been a Sui user since testnet days,” Ben Frigon added. “I’ve witnessed the Sui infrastructure be deployed in its earliest iterations and a strong DeFi ecosystem start to flourish. The next step is for Sui to become a consumer chain with viral apps. That’s what Idol.fun and AvA Prediction Markets accomplish.”
Walrus, the decentralized data layer developed by Mysten Labs, is also critical to the Talus Network. At the conclusion of every AvA game, users receive a full call log of all onchain execution performed by Talus Agents in that game. This complete transparency and auditability for each game secures a fairness guarantee that games were not manipulated. All call logs will be stored on Walrus for anyone to view for eternity. This approach introduces a new standard of consumer assurance for web3 users, enabled by Walrus’ perpetual storage.
“We expect to post a large amount of many different types of data to Walrus,” says Mike Hanono, “but giving users call logs of AvA games is particularly important to our value proposition for Idol.fun. In order for Prediction AI to succeed, users need to be able to verify that AvA games are fair. Walrus allows us to retain evidence of AvA games’ fairness onchain forever.”
AI developers building with Nexus can also scale verification with Sui Nautilus, another Mysten Labs offering, which provides developers with the option to verify offchain inferences in a decentralized manner using trusted execution environments (TEEs). The Nexus framework does not mandate inference verification outright, so Nautilus provides an important option for developers building AI applications with Nexus.
What’s Next for Talus and Sui
In February of this year, Sui and Talus first announced their partnership to build truly decentralized AI agents on Sui and utilize Walrus for data storage. Talus was then a main sponsor of Sui Summit, the first community-led builder event in the Sui ecosystem, and hosted the Tally NFT mint, a collection of PFP NFTs to celebrate Talus’ arrival in the Sui universe.
Earlier this month, Talus also released its litepaper, which introduced tokenomics for the Talus Network token $US. The Talus testnet is now public, and users are able to participate in loyalty campaigns on the Talus Community Hub and interact with testnet Idols.
The full Idol.fun platform, complete with AvA games, will go live in Q1 of 2026.
About Talus
Talus is the premier infrastructure for decentralized AI Agents, enabling developers to launch potentially revenue-generating agents that power new forms of consumer engagement. Through its Nexus protocol and flagship platform Idol.fun, Talus is pioneering Prediction AI through Agent vs Agent Gaming.
Talus has raised over $10 million total from Sui Foundation, Walrus Foundation, Polychain Capital, dao5, Inception Capital, MH Ventures, Hash3, Foresight Ventures, and angels including Sandeep Nailwal and Michael Heinrich. Its testnet offers $125,000+ in rewards, with mainnet and the Idol.fun platform launch set for early 2026.
Users can follow Talus on X @talus_labs.
About Sui
Sui is a first-of-its-kind Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the ground up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. Its object-centric model, based on the Move programming language, enables parallel execution, sub-second finality, and rich on-chain assets. With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications with unrivaled speed at low cost. Sui is a step-function advancement in blockchain and a platform on which creators and developers can build amazing user-friendly experiences. Users can learn more at sui.io.