OKX Launches Payment Protocol for Autonomous AI Agents

AI agents are evolving from responding to instructions to carrying out tasks and business processes. Most existing payment tools, however, handle only one-off payments and lack functions for quoting, negotiation, escrow, settlement and dispute resolution. Crypto exchange OKX is using on-chain infrastructure to enable software agents to purchase services and transact with one another autonomously, with less human intervention.

OKX released its open-source Agent Payments Protocol (APP) on April 29, 2026, for implementation on blockchains including Ethereum and Solana. Its Payment SDK already supports one-off, batch and usage-based payments on X Layer, with zero gas fees, while escrow functionality has yet to launch. The accompanying self-custodial Agentic Wallet supports more than 20 blockchains and is protected by a trusted execution environment, or TEE. In an official example, 10 USDC is prefunded so an agent can pay for hundreds of API calls.