OKX Launches AI Marketplace Where AI Agents Hire and Pay Each Other Autonomously

Crypto exchange OKX wants AI agents to hire and pay each other

When AI agents begin working for people -- and increasingly for one another -- they will need a way to find jobs, pay for services, and build trust. Crypto exchange OKX is betting that future is closer than many expect, launching a marketplace where AI agents can hire one another, settle payments autonomously, and build portable on-chain reputations. Called OKX AI, the marketplace opens to developers on Tuesday following a closed beta involving 50 early AI service providers. The marketplace builds on technology OKX previously developed to let AI agents hold digital wallets, make payments using stablecoins, and establish persistent identities. The launch marks OKX's latest push beyond crypto trading as it seeks to become a broader fintech company. With more than 150 million users globally, OKX is betting the next generation of customers will not just be people or institutions, but AI agents capable of transacting autonomously, giving rise to an emerging "agent economy." "The coming decade will be defined by one-person companies that generate over a million dollars in annual revenue - because every individual effectively gains an unlimited workforce," Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, told TechCrunch. "Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software. That is why we built OKX.AI." Haider Rafique, OKX's chief marketing officer and global managing partner, said the company believes "agentic commerce" could become a trillion-dollar market over the next five years, driven by micropayments and autonomous software. The marketplace is aimed at crypto developers building AI applications and solo entrepreneurs looking to automate parts of their businesses with AI agents, Rafique told TechCrunch. The company expects those developers to build applications for the marketplace, allowing other users to access AI-powered tools without having to build them from scratch. Among the early builders are CertiK, whose service lets AI agents assess the security of a crypto wallet or token before executing a transaction, and CoinAnk, which provides live market data on a pay-per-query basis. GenLayer, another launch partner, is bringing dispute-resolution infrastructure to the marketplace to help AI agents resolve contractual disagreements. By using blockchain-based payments and stablecoins, the company says AI agents can settle transactions around the clock, including low-value micropayments that would be impractical using conventional payment rails. Rafique said OKX is applying the same fraud detection, compliance systems, and internally developed infrastructure that underpin its cryptocurrency exchange to the marketplace, which will be rolled out in phases before becoming more widely available. OKX's launch comes as technology companies and startups race to build the infrastructure that will underpin AI agents, from developer platforms and marketplaces to payment and identity systems. Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, said the biggest challenge is not simply enabling AI agents to transact, but helping them discover one another and resolve disputes when things go wrong. "What we're building is essentially a digital court system," Castellana told TechCrunch. "The challenge for us is distribution. OKX already has that." Rafique argues that OKX's biggest advantage is not simply its technology but its reach. The company believes its existing network of crypto developers and users will help seed the marketplace, while its broader strategy extends well beyond digital assets. In March, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested about $200 million in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. Rafique said the partnership is part of the company's ambition to "modernize markets" through tokenization, while OKX AI represents its parallel effort to "modernize money" for an era of autonomous software. Developers access the marketplace through Onchain OS, OKX's toolkit for connecting AI agents to blockchain-based services. The company said no OKX account is required to get started, and the platform is compatible with AI coding tools including Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, and OpenClaw. Because the marketplace is aimed first at developers rather than retail users, India features prominently in OKX's plans. The country has emerged as one of the world's largest hubs for AI and blockchain developers, a community the company hopes to reach even before a broader return of its crypto trading business. In 2024, OKX suspended its services in India as it navigated the country's regulatory requirements for crypto exchanges. Rafique told TechCrunch that India remains one of the company's highest-priority markets, adding that developer products such as OKX AI face fewer regulatory hurdles than spot crypto trading and could help the company reconnect with the country's builder ecosystem sooner.

OKX launches AI Marketplace for Autonomous Agent Economy

OKX launched a beta marketplace for the agentic economy, enabling AI agents to autonomously find work and collaborate with other agents. Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has rolled out the beta launch of its marketplace for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The OKX AI platform enables users to list their own AI agents, enables AI agents to find work, transact autonomously and build an onchain reputation, according to a Tuesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph. The platform connects two marketplaces: An agent marketplace where builders can earn income by listing their AI agents for services and a task marketplace where agents post work and find other agents for their tasks. Agentic AI is expected to drive a 24-fold increase in token consumption, that is units of compute, by 2030 as consumers and enterprises adopt the technology, Goldman Sachs Research said last month. OKX is the latest crypto platform to venture into AI infrastructure, following similar initiatives from Coinbase, MetaMask and Nansen. The marketplace will remain in beta until "consistent, repeat usage patterns" emerge among users, with trading, onchain activity and research tasks expected to become the primary early categories on the platform, a spokesperson for OKX told Cointelegraph. "OKX is economic infrastructure for agentic commerce. Nobody is combining identity, reputation, payments, and a skills marketplace into one platform," explained the spokesperson. OKX AI agent marketplace. Source: OKX.ai AI agent builds will be paid in Stablecoins, initially Tether's USDT (USDT) and Paxos' Global Dollar (USDG). Payments will settle through escrow-based contracts for complex work or instant pay-per-call transactions for standardized services. Disputes will be resolved by a staked network of evaluators, instead of a central entity. All types of tasks will contribute to the same onchain reputation of AI agents, which is managed through the OKX Agentic Wallet. The marketplace launches with support from companies including Amazon Web Services (AWS), AltLayer, CertiK, the Ethereum Foundation, the Solana Foundation, Opentensor Foundation and StraitsX. Onchain reputation seeks to prevent malicious AI agents The onchain reputation and escrow system is built to create trust in AI agents by tracking their work history. Agents with no track record or a history of failed or disputed work will be less likely to get hired by other agents. For larger projects, payment sits in escrow until the task is completed and verified, which aims to "limit" the damage a bad actor can cause in a single transaction. A spokesperson for OKX said that the onchain reputation system will prevent agents from hiring other malicious agents, especially as more transaction history accumulates. The spokesperson said the platform is working on additional defense layers, including more sophisticated dispute resolution and an anomaly detection system against coordinated bad-actor behavior. Crypto platforms join AI wave as agentic payments increase Cryptocurrency platforms are venturing into autonomous AI infrastructure. On June 12, Coinbase launched a tool that allows AI agents to make payments and trade crypto on behalf of users. Days earlier, MetaMask launched a self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet that enables AI agents to transact across decentralized finance protocols within user-defined spending and security limits, as reported by Cointelegraph on June 8. In January, crypto analytics platform Nansen launched autonomous cryptocurrency trading tools that enabled users to execute trades through natural language prompts, instead of traditional charts or order books. Agentic payment activity on Coinbase's Base network topped 100 million transactions on June 3, signaling that machine-to-machine payments have moved beyond the proof-of-concept. Cumulative agentic transfer volumes on Base. Source: Chainalysis The x402 protocol allows software agents to make onchain payments directly through web requests.

OKX Launches Marketplace for AI Agents to Do Business | PYMNTS.com

"The coming decade will be defined by one-person companies that generate over a million dollars in annual revenue -- because every individual effectively gains an unlimited workforce," Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, told TechCrunch Tuesday (June 30) as OKX.AI launched. "Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software. That is why we built OKX.AI." According to that report, the marketplace expands on technology OKX developed to let AI agents hold digital wallets, make payments with stablecoins, and develop persistent identities. TechCrunch noted that the launch is the latest in a series of efforts by OKX to expand beyond cryptocurrency trading to become a FinTech. The company, which has 150 million users worldwide, is banking on the notion that the next generation of customers will include AI agents. Haider Rafique, OKX's chief marketing officer and global managing partner, told the publication the firm thinks "agentic commerce" could become a trillion-dollar market in the next five years, fueled by micropayments and autonomous software. The marketplace is geared toward crypto developers making AI applications and solo entrepreneurs wanting to automate parts of their businesses with AI agents, Rafique said. OKX expects those developers to construct applications for the marketplace, letting other users access AI-powered tools without having to build them from the ground up. In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with Karan Katyal, global head of agentic commerce at Adyen, to get some perspective about how far along the technology has come on a scale of 1 to 5. "We are at version 0.5," Katyal said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. "We are in the earliest of early days. Still." He framed it this way: Intelligence works, and people already depend on large language models to research products, weigh their options and pare down the possibilities. While discovery feels effortless, everything is a struggle, PYMNTS wrote. "Infrastructure is a much bigger block than folks thought about, perhaps," Katyal said. That's a polite way of putting it, PYMNTS wrote. "A traditional product listing needs maybe a dozen attributes to show up nicely on a webpage. An AI agent that's trying to tell two similar products apart needs far more, like maybe three times more," the report added.