Crypto exchange OKX is the latest to roll out an open standard for agentic payments, with the introduction of its Agent Payments Protocol (APP) on Wednesday. This follows similar offerings like x402, the open protocol incubated by Coinbase, and the Machine Payments Protocol proposed by Stripe.

Notably, OKX said APP is designed to handle full business cycles, in addition to supporting AI bots "pay for services and pay each other."

"In the past few months, AI agents moved from answering questions to running workflows, managing business processes, and acting autonomously on behalf of users," OKX wrote. "The bottleneck shifted from intelligence to commerce - not just paying, but the full cycle of doing business: quoting, negotiating, escrowing funds, metering usage, settling, and resolving disputes (escrow, dispute resolution coming soon)."

"Existing agentic payment solutions handle none of this," OKX added. 

APP is an open standard designed to work “across every chain,” with Solana and Ethereum in particular named in the blog. At the "implementation layer," APP will also operate a Payment SDK that enables developers to roll out support for one-time payments, batch payments and pay-as-you-go payments using OKX’s X Layer blockchain, offering zero or low gas transactions. 

It also integrates the self-custodial, TEE-secured OKX Agentic Wallet, which supports over 20 chains. In addition to supporting the full range of business use cases for AI bots, APP also connects agents for communication over the internet’s HTTP and XMTP protocols and messaging platforms like Telegram.

Notably, APP will also roll out escrow functionality, so that funds can be released only upon delivery of a good or service. It will also feature built-in "dispute resolution."

OKX’s announcement comes amid increasing experimentation with agentic commerce. x402, for instance, now features an entire app store where AI bots can purchase goods and services — from access to the Bloomberg terminal to AWS Lambda infrastructure — a la carte. 

It also builds on OKX’s previous AI-focused releases, including Onchain OS, Agentic Wallet, Agent Trade Kit, and x402 support. According to an X post, APP also received support from AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Sahara AI, among other tech providers, as well as crypto service providers like Nansen, Uniswap, Paxos and QuickNode.

At the chain level, OKX reportedly collaborated with Base, the Ethereum Foundation, Solana, Sui, Aptos, Optimism, and others.

"Built on years of accumulation in on-chain infrastructure and AI, and co-created with a group of outstanding partners from the fields of cloud computing, L1, public chain ecosystems, DeFi, and AI," OKX CEO Star Xu said on X. "This is the key step that brings the Agent economy to real-world implementation."

In total, APP is pitched as a more comprehensive open standard for "agentic commerce," not simply one-off payments, but support for full business cycles, from making offers to disputing transactions, all operated by bots.