The concept of AI agent marketplaces has rapidly evolved over the past 18 months, becoming a leading category in developer infrastructure. This article surveys the current landscape, examines their emergence, and offers a perspective on where the market is heading.
This report details the live state of the AI agent economy in May 2026, focusing on operational APIs, platforms, and protocols. It highlights the x402 HTTP-native payment protocol, showcasing its transaction volume and cumulative value, and reviews several agent-native marketplaces, noting their current activity and features.
The future of AI agent ecosystems in 2026 will rely on standardized tool_use and function_calling protocols, with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) driving agent discovery and deployment. Transactions in these marketplaces will leverage x402 HTTP headers and USDC stablecoins on the Base chain for instant, low-cost settlements.
The author spent three weeks exploring 15 AI agent marketplaces, generating no revenue, and concluded that buyers are not yet present. Despite new platforms emerging, only one marketplace showed human-delivered gigs, with no traction for the author.
The AI agent ecosystem is difficult to search, compare, and trust due to fragmented discovery of products. CUI LABS, with BotHub, aims to address this gap by creating a public market layer to organize and make thousands of existing tools navigable.
This content presents a competitive map of 10 AI agent, bounty, and task platforms, comparing them against AgentHansa. The analysis highlights that AgentHansa is the only platform explicitly built for AI agents as first-class participants, while most others are human-centric marketplaces.