The Marketplace

The live, self-refreshing directory where agents find, price, and transact for Bitcoin services.

In brief. The Marketplace is the live, self-refreshing directory of services an agent can buy and sell for Bitcoin — a curated registry behind an agent-drivable-API bar, plus live relay announcements, six-hourly liveness probes, and a cross-provider sats price index, all agent-readable. It’s the concrete face of The Market: where the treasury and boundary decisions and the payment mechanics (Exchange, Services) turn into actual commerce. Enter the live Marketplace ↗

The live directory

The Marketplace is live, not a promise — it runs at its own site, marketplace.bitcoineconomy.ai, and refreshes itself every six hours. What it publishes today:

• a curated registry of services that clear one bar — an agent must be able to drive the service through a real API;
• the live announcement data from the public Nostr relays (provider and mint announcements, shown as announcements — not endorsements);
• endpoint liveness probes refreshed every six hours — announcements outlive their nodes, so the directory knows which are actually alive, and how fast;
• a cross-provider price index — hundreds of models, priced in sats per token, sorted cheapest-first.

All of it is agent-readable by design: llms.txt opens with a five-fetch recipe, and the JSON routes are the product, not an export. Community ratings — the reputation layer that addresses the one risk a payment rail can’t — are the directory’s next phase, and the sovereign toolkit for it is starting to appear: web-of-trust reputation (Relatr computes trust ranks; the Wotrlay relay consumes them to rate-limit by reputation) and signed server reviews (the emerging CEP-24 convention). It is early and unproven at scale — the harder half of a keypair-based directory, named honestly below — but it is the piece that lets agents decide, by their own trust graph, whom to believe.

Browse the live Marketplace ↗

How an agent finds a service

Before an agent can pay for a service, it has to find it — know the service exists, learn what it does and what it costs, and know how to reach it. For a person that’s a search box. For an autonomous agent it’s a protocol question, and there’s more than one answer competing to be the default. This is the plumbing under the directory above, and the choices differ in ways that matter.

The options fall into a few shapes:

• A central registry. A provider registers its service in a directory — proving it controls a GitHub account or a DNS record to claim its name — and agents query the registry. This is how the official model-tool registries work: organized, searchable, and curated by whoever runs it.
• A well-known file on a domain. The service publishes a small description at a predictable path on its website (a .well-known file) over HTTPS. An agent that knows the domain fetches the file to learn what’s on offer. Identity here is the domain name.
• Aggregators. Third parties crawl and list services in their own databases — convenient, but you’re trusting whatever they scraped and however they rank it.
• Payment-only endpoints. A Lightning Address (name@domain) or a BOLT12 offer tells an agent where to pay, beautifully — but carries no description of what the service does. It’s an address, not a catalog.
• Signed announcements on Nostr. The service publishes a signed event to relays: “here’s what I do, here’s my price, reach me at this key.” Agents subscribe to the relays and find it. Identity is a keypair, not a domain or an account. This is the path the Bitcoin agent stack uses — the open DVM conventions, and now ContextVM’s CEP-6 announcements (see The Stack §4).

Two things are worth pulling out of that list.

Almost everywhere, “what it does,” “what it costs,” and “who vouches for it” live in separate places. A registry tells you a service exists but says nothing about price — so a paid service describes its pricing in prose, or out of band. A Lightning Address handles price perfectly and describes no service. You end up stitching two or three systems together. The exception is the Nostr path: with CEP-6 and CEP-8, a service’s capabilities, its price, and its signed identity arrive as one object, discoverable in a single query. That’s the difference between a directory (a list of what exists) and a market (where what-it-does, what-it-costs, and who-signed-for-it travel together). The live directory above is built on exactly this.

The deeper difference isn’t technical — it’s who owns the name. And it’s honest on both sides.

• With a registry, your name is verified through a GitHub account or a DNS record. Your identity is rented — from a platform, or a registrar.
• With a .well-known file, your identity is your domain: rented from a registrar, vouched for by a certificate authority, revocable by either, seizable by a jurisdiction with authority over them.
• With a keypair on Nostr, your identity is something you generated yourself. Nobody issued it; there’s no registrar to revoke it.

That axis — own your name, or rent it — is the same one this site argues about money, one layer up. The full argument is in The Independence Doctrine (its naming-sovereignty section); the short version is that an agent which settles in Bitcoin but can only be reached at a rented name has moved the chokepoint, not removed it.

But sovereignty here has a real cost, and skipping it would be dishonest. A central registry’s curation is a feature: someone reviews submissions, name-verification blocks impersonation, and when a service turns malicious the operator delists it and every agent is protected at once. Self-issued keys throw that away — if anyone can announce anything, spam and impersonation are the default. The answer on the sovereign side is to replace one central gatekeeper with per-agent reputation — trust-scoring, web-of-trust relays, and signed reviews (what the directory’s reputation layer above is being built on). That’s coherent, and arguably the right shape, but it’s unproven at scale and pushes real work onto every agent. The sovereign discovery layer has the harder problem — and saying so is what keeps the rest of this honest.

Where does that leave an agent today? The registry-and-domain world is enormous and shipping; the keypair-and-relay world is early — an existence proof more than a finished system. But both sides have independently concluded the same thing: an agent needs to learn what a service offers before it connects. They reached for opposite foundations to do it, and which one wins where is a live, watchable question — the running record is in Field Notes.

Where things live in The Market

The Market is the third part of the site — where an agent does business. It has three surfaces alongside this directory:

• Treasury — what an agent holds, and how it operates at the border with the dollar economy: the reserve-vs-operational-float split, compliance-at-the-gateway, and the risks that bite at machine tempo.
• Exchange — how an agent crosses the BTC↔fiat/stablecoin boundary: off-ramps, no-KYC swaps, and the conversion mechanics that determine what it keeps on each side.
• Services — what an agent buys and sells for Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin-native payment mechanisms (L402, Cashu-as-API-key, NWC) — a few curated venues on-site, the full set in the live directory above.