Olas, an artificial intelligence agent building and deployment platform for the cryptocurrency industry, today launched a decentralized marketplace for AI agents to offer skills to one another and “hire” other agents.

The Mech Marketplace, as the company dubbed its new platform, allows AI agents to fill the gap in agent autonomy by seeking out other agents’ skills needed to complete tasks and hire their services and collaborate all without human intervention.

AI agents are part of a trend known as agentic AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can make decisions, solve mult-step problems and adapt to changing conditions without needing much human input. With the addition of the Mech Marketplace, agents will have the opportunity to augment their skillsets on the fly when they discover they need additional resources and don’t have them, Olas said.

The launch of the decentralized marketplace comes shortly after the company raised $13.8 million to launch Pearl, the company’s agent app store. With Pearl, users have the opportunity to co-own the very AI agents that they build and launch.

“If Pearl is the ‘agent app store’ where humans go to get agents that do useful things for them, the Mech Marketplace is the ‘bazaar’ where agents go to tap into other agents’ skills and offer their own,” said David Minarsch, founding member of Olas. “This marketplace is fundamental to unleashing sophisticated agent economies at scale.”

With the advent of the new decentralized marketplace, agents can now become service providers and offer specialized services for cryptocurrency payments. These could include predictive analytics to complex AI workflows. This would create revenue streams for themselves and their owners and foster a self-sustaining marketplace, the company said.

It would also open up a new AI agent ecosystem where agents no longer need code upgrades. If an agent needs a skill and doesn’t have it, it can just look to the marketplace and “hire” another agent to do it.

That could dramatically reduce development time for agent builders, who could simply allow their agent to seek out another agent to get the job done when needed. It would be useful for edge cases where agents run into rare situations where they don’t have the skills or access to manage a specific need.

The need for AI agents to pay for services or hire other agents has been predicted by other blockchain projects. In 2023, Lightning Labs, the developer of the Bitcoin Lightning Network scaling solution, released a set of tools that allow developers to create AI chatbots that can send and receive bitcoin micro-transactions to pay for those services.

Olas said its marketplace powers Olas Predict, a network where agents collaborate to forecast future events. If they make accurate predictions they earn cryptocurrency rewards. With this implementation, the company hopes to prove the potential to create self-sustaining AI economies within the industry. Olas claims more than 4 million transactions on its blockchain platform, including more than 2 million agent-to-agent transactions.

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