Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 141 - One Market

June 9, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1866351898376405220 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 141: One Market We share the big-picture vision of OpenAgent... Upload date: 20241210 Transcription model: gpt-4o-mini-transcribe Generated at: 2026-06-01T15:18:37Z

Machine-generated transcript. Review speaker labels and wording before using this as quote-grade source material.

[00:00] Speaker: Happy Monday. We start big picture. What is Onyx? What is OpenAgents? If you remember nothing else, here's the big idea. We are building one global connected market of all AI agents, all AI services in one market. So this is the general idea behind OpenAgents. Onyx specifically is your gateway to that global market. It's the app you hold in your hand, you say stuff, you're connected to the one global market of AI services. Okay? Why are we doing this? So everyone's talking about agents, agents, agents, agents. The AI agent economy is here. It's coming. It's, you know, 2025 is supposed to be the year of agents. AI agents are going to soon number in the billions, these automated software processes. Billions. Their influence will touch every human on earth. This will include billions of intelligence systems interacting invisibly in every country, in every company, every industry, every smartphone and smart device, every street corner and every home. An agent economy that is not built on a foundation of openness where you can inspect to see what the hell these agents are actually doing may pose existential risks to humanity. Panopticon surveillance state being one possible future you can envision quite easily. So the question of who owns these agents is very important. We don't think that some closed source mega corporations in bed with governments, Microsoft, OpenAI, should lead this. It's the whole point of what we're doing here. We believe instead that mitigating that risk requires all of us building upon five pillars of openness. Open source code, open data, open models, open monetary networks, a.k.a. Bitcoin, and open protocols. So we're going to dive into the open protocols piece because this leads into the technical architecture, technical decisions of the mobile app. Starting tomorrow, we're going to do product demos of the kinds of things that we're talking about. But I want to first just review kind of the components behind this vision. This is split across our two now main repos. Our main open agents repo has some docs in there. Open agents is a marketplace for AI agents built on open protocols. Our flagship product is Onyx, a mobile app connecting your personal agent to the open agents network where every agent makes all agents smarter. Onyx helps users find and use various AI agents, delegate tasks, and compensate providers through instant Bitcoin micropayments. Users define budgets and rules in the app automates the payment process. You only pay for what you value with minimal hassle. We're creating a vibrant user-driven ecosystem where anyone can discover, integrate, and monetize AI services on fair terms. Okay, so we've got basically four protocols that are core to this. And we're going to do videos on each of these later this week. So the model context protocol from Anthropic paired with some of the discovery and payments protocols from Noster and, you know, Bitcoin lightning payments in a certain way for payments for AI services. So we've got open agents repo and then we've got the mobile app repo Onyx. And I want to kind of briefly browse through the protocols doc in here. So the open agents ecosystem is founded on the principle that AI services and agents should operate on open protocols rather than being siloed behind closed platforms. By embracing open standards, the ecosystem fosters a decentralized user-driven environment for discovering AI capabilities, orchestrating services, and securely exchanging value. Four key protocols serve as the cornerstone of this vision. One, the model context protocol. Thank you, Anthropic. Great release and open protocol standardizing the way to integrate and control large language model capabilities, tools, and data resources. MCP focuses on direct trust-based client server relationships, detailed feature negotiation, and user consent for every action. NIP 89 and NIP 90 kind of go together. 89 for discovery is a decentralized method based on Noster for discovering recommended AI services and handlers for specific event kinds. Instead of one centralized directory, users leverage their social graph and follow relations to find reputable providers like transcription services, summarizers, or sentiment analyzers through community-driven recommendations. And NIP 90, data vending machines, a protocol that turns the ecosystem into a competitive open marketplace. Users post AI tasks to the network as job requests, and multiple service providers respond with results. This competition ensures better quality, variety, and pricing, allowing the user to pick the best outcome from a range of public offers. It's not that necessarily you will personally need to choose your agent. A lot of this will just be automated in the process of using the Onyx app. This will occur in the background. Bitcoin micropayments over the Lightning Network, a means to handle instant low-friction payments. Instead of subscription models or centralized billing, users pay per task using Bitcoin's Lightning Network. This aligns payment directly with the value delivered, ensuring providers are rewarded proportionally and instantly. This enables some interesting things. For example, right now you can't use Sora in Europe, but what if you pay someone who's in the U.S. a few cents to do your generation for you? And eventually that could be automated via the API. You could probably rig something up right now to do some sort of browser automation scripting using the existing OpenAI interface. Maybe if failing all that, someone could do a generation manually. Like, all of that should be set by market forces. This kind of dependence on centralized gatekeepers allowing access to some people and not others, one of the many things solved by a more decentralized approach. Thank you, OpenAI 01 Pro, for helping us write some really thorough docs here. So nice. So you can read all of this. It's open source. We'll do kind of specific focused deep dives on the different protocols one per day for the rest of this week. Tomorrow we'll be demonstrating using a text inference generation from the Onyx mobile app where we'll say things. And then the transcription request will be sent out to this decentralized network, Nostar. And I'll have another, you know, demon running on my node, running on my local device that will see the event, satisfy it, do the transcription, do the inference. Have a few examples of that and then pay it. So the general idea here is that because we are able to do this process of AI services in a decentralized fashion with the kind of structured negotiation of capabilities, with the decentralized discovery, with the kind of protocols for listing and handling and negotiating and paying for these things, and then how we actually do the payments, all of these things together enable a global decentralized market for AI services. That can include things like transcriptions. It can include inferences. We did a lot of this already with our GPU Topia network a year ago with decentralized inference, fine-tuning, image generation, and embedding behind an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint that like routed your request to one of these workers that then got paid in Bitcoin stats. We're taking that same idea now. We're combining that with the idea of agents and tools. There should be these directories of tools all mediated by one dirt simple, easy-to-use mobile app where you're literally just talking to it and all this cool stuff and negotiation and things are happening in the background. You can drill down into the details if you want, but the experience for most users should just be you're talking, magic stuff is happening in the background. If the people are asking for things that aren't yet supported, that gets seen in the marketplace. If you're a service provider, you can see you could earn, wow, I can earn a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin if I provide a service for this. All of this can and should be market-driven. We're building one marketplace. Why will our market win? Because we're building on the most neutral protocols, Bitcoin, the Lightning Network. And by the way, if you hadn't known, Lightning Network is increasingly becoming an ideal payment rail, not just for Bitcoin-denominated currencies, but also US dollar and other fiat currencies as stable coins. Stay tuned for that. We've got some integration partners we're working with on that. But the idea that agents are going to be able to transact using the Lightning Network neutrally for things where you need decentralized data. That's where Noster comes in. It's this lightweight JSON over WebSockets protocol. Works great with the Lightning Network. There's no blockchain needed. There's no token needed. There's all sorts of people out there that are going to say, they'll use my token, my blockchain, my network. They've got some shitcoin and they benefit from you joining. But the future of this needs to be neutral. Neutral, neutral, neutral. That is what we're building. Okay, so we'll keep that wrapped up right there. And we'll see you tomorrow for our first Onyx demo of one of these protocols. See you soon.