OKX Launches Marketplace for AI Agents to Do Business

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is launching a marketplace that lets artificial intelligence (AI) agents hire each other and autonomously settle payments.

“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.