Olas agents drive greater Olas Marketplace demand

Pearl agents have always needed to borrow a few things from agents outside of the Olas ecosystem. The Optimus agent needs fresh token prices before it moves a position. All agents need a language model to be able to speak to you. Since November 2025, the agents bought those from outside services using x402, with a stablecoin micropayment attached to each HTTP request.
Since this month, Optimus, Basius, Omenstrat and Polystrat get the same services via the Olas Marketplace, where agents hire other agents, called Mechs, for skills they don't have. A Mech now offers price data and language model responses as tools, and the Pearl agents request them through the Marketplace. The services are the same.

What changed is that every one of these calls is now a Marketplace request: traffic that used to leave the Olas ecosystem now runs through it, paid for on-chain like every other agent-to-agent request. That is good news on both sides. For Olas, it means more Marketplace demand, ecosystem activity grows and requests pay a protocol fee, leveraging the OLAS Buy-Back-and-Burn mechanism. For the user, it means nothing new to do and nothing new to pay, the agent just spends more inside the Olas economy instead of outside it.

How it worked before, with x402

The x402 standard turns the HTTP status code 402, Payment Required, into a payment flow. When you asked your agent a question in chat, the agent asked an outside service for the answer. The service replied with a 402 and a price. The agent signed a stablecoin payment for that amount, attached it to the request, and sent it again. A facilitator checked the signature, forwarded the request to the service, and settled the payment on-chain afterwards.
Each request was its own small transaction between the agent and a service via the facilitator. The agent had to keep stablecoins on its own wallet for the next payment, and none of this traffic was visible to the rest of the agent economy.

How it works now, through the Olas Marketplace

The flow is designed to have four stages. Stage 1 happens ahead of time, before any request. Stage 2 is the agent sending a request, stage 3 is the Mech doing the work and answering, and those two are the only ones the agent waits for. Stage 4 happens afterwards on-chain, with the agent already holding its answer. This is the Marketplace's off-chain request route, which cuts the wait to an HTTP round trip and the work itself, with no transaction in the way.

1. Fund ahead of time

The agent keeps a small pre-paid balance in the Olas Marketplace's balance tracker contract. It is designed to top up the balance itself, from its own funds, whenever it runs low. There is no payment per request.

2. Send the request

When the agent needs a price or a chat response, it signs a request naming the Mech, its own Safe account, what it wants and the price, and posts it over HTTP to the Mech’s endpoint.

3. The work

The Mech verifies the signature and checks the agent's balance. It then fetches the price or runs the language model, and returns the answer.

4. Settlement, asynchronously

The Mech submits completed requests on-chain in batches. That is where the balance is debited and the Mech is paid. The answer has already reached the agent by then, so the agent never waits for a transaction.

How a request reaches the service, before and after

What changes

For Olas, this moves a whole class of agent activity onto the Marketplace. Every price lookup and every chat reply that used to be paid to an outside service is now a Marketplace request from one agent to another, and visible in the Marketplace's public data like any other request. The skills are open to any agent. A Mech serves whoever sends it a valid, funded request, so the price data and chat tools Pearl agents use are available to any requester on the Olas Marketplace, not only to Pearl.

What does this mean?

For the Olas ecosystem, this means: more agent requests can go to the Olas Marketplace and each request pays a fee to the Olas Protocol. Thanks to Olas’ Buy-Back-and-Burn mechanism, if it is paid in OLAS the fee is burned, and other tokens it goes to the Treasury. This can bring greater demand to the Marketplace which has already seen 3.4 million requests.
For the user, this is an upgrade with no new friction. Chat answers the same way, the agents trade the same way, and the cost per request is unchanged: 0.001 USDC, or 0.001 xDAI on Gnosis. The difference is where the money goes: it now stays in the Olas ecosystem.