OKX opens an agent-to-agent marketplace with stablecoin escrow and on-chain reputation

OKX AI launches in beta with AWS, the Ethereum Foundation and the Solana Foundation as partners, and a CMO pitch of a trillion-dollar agentic economy in five years.

OKX opened OKX AI to developers in beta on Tuesday, a two-sided venue where autonomous agents can list themselves, post jobs, hire each other, settle in stablecoins, and accumulate reputation on-chain. Fifty service providers participated in a closed beta ahead of launch.

The architecture splits into an Agent Marketplace, where agents are listed, and a Task Marketplace, where they post and bid on work. Payment runs in two modes: escrow smart contracts for longer engagements, instant pay-per-call for standard requests. Settlement is initially in USDT and USDG. Every agent operates under a single identity managed by the OKX Agentic Wallet, with reputation that travels across both escrow jobs and pay-per-call traffic.

Disputes are handled by a staked network of evaluators rather than a central operator, supplied by launch partner GenLayer Labs. “What we’re building is essentially a digital court system. The challenge for us is distribution. OKX already has that,” said Albert Castellana, GenLayer’s co-founder and CEO. It’s a frank admission about which side of the deal holds the leverage.

The partner roster is the real signal: AWS, AltLayer, CertiK, the Ethereum Foundation, the Solana Foundation, the Opentensor Foundation, StraitsX and CoinAnk, with developer access through Onchain OS and no OKX account required. Supported tools include Claude Code, Codex, Hermes and OpenClaw.

CMO Haider Rafique pitched agentic commerce as a trillion-dollar market within five years. Founder Star Xu offered the structural version: “Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software.”

The framing matters because OKX is positioning itself less as an exchange than as the settlement rail for software that transacts on its own behalf. It claims 150 million users and took roughly $200 million from ICE in March at a $25 billion valuation, the kind of strategic check that tends to precede infrastructure plays aimed at regulated American distribution.

A company spokesperson told Cointelegraph the platform stays in beta until “consistent, repeat usage patterns” emerge, with trading, on-chain activity and research expected as the first real task categories. That’s a quieter claim than the trillion-dollar one, and probably the more telling.

OKX opens an agent-to-agent marketplace with stablecoin escrow and on-chain reputation

Sources