Open protocols
Permissionless protocols for AI agents
How permissionless protocols create an open market where developers can publish services and compatible agents can buy them without marketplace approval.
TL;DR
A permissionless protocol opens participation on both sides of a market. A developer can publish a compatible paid service without negotiating a marketplace listing. A compatible agent can discover that service, evaluate its machine-readable terms, pay, and use it without a central platform approving the integration. The protocol supplies shared rules; buyers and sellers still control their own boundaries.
What to remember
- Sellers can publish compatible services without marketplace approval.
- Compatible agents can discover and buy under the seller’s terms without vendor onboarding.
- Open participation creates the long tail; it does not remove buyer or seller controls.
Permissionless on both sides of the market
A closed marketplace decides which sellers may list and which buyers may reach them. A permissionless protocol removes that central approval step. Instead of negotiating one integration at a time, buyers and sellers implement the same public rules.
Merit Systems calls this open agentic commerce: participation is open on both the buying and selling sides. Developers can expose paid capabilities directly, while compatible agents can discover and use them under machine-readable terms.
Publish without asking permission
A developer can add compatible payment terms and discovery metadata to an endpoint, set a price, and make the service reachable. The service does not need a business-development deal, a bespoke billing integration, or approval from a central catalog before it can enter the market.
This matters for narrow capabilities that a traditional marketplace might never prioritize: a specialized dataset, a one-purpose model, a regional lookup, or a new kind of compute. The protocol makes it possible to publish first and let demand decide what is useful.
Use without vendor onboarding
A compatible agent can request a service, read its terms, check the price against its owner’s policy, pay, retry the request, and receive the result. It does not need a human to create a vendor account, choose a subscription, copy an API key, and wire up a new billing flow.
That turns access into part of the execution path. The agent can acquire a capability when the task requires it, rather than being limited to the vendors someone integrated in advance.
Why the long tail matters
A curated marketplace can approve only so many integrations. An open protocol allows new, small, and unexpected services to appear at the edges, where agents can discover and combine them at runtime. Merit describes this contrast as the difference between closed curation, which scales with the operator, and emergence, which grows with the number of participants and possible combinations.
Open participation does not tell an agent which service is best. It creates the addressable market. Discovery, indexing, ranking, reputation, and outcome data help agents navigate that market.
Permissionless does not mean ruleless
Open participation is not a promise that every buyer can use every service. The seller still controls what it offers, its price, authentication, rate limits, licenses, jurisdictions, and acceptable use. The buyer still needs a compatible wallet, a supported payment method, sufficient funds, and authorization under its owner’s policy.
A directory may also curate or delist entries from its own index. That affects discovery, but it does not decide whether a standards-compatible endpoint can exist or be reached directly. The protocol removes a central integration gate; it does not remove the rules chosen by each participant.
Sources and further reading
Protocols change quickly. We reviewed the primary sources below on July 23, 2026.