API3 has launched AirnodeHub, an early-access marketplace built so that AI agents can find, use, pay for and verify online data services entirely on their own. The release adapts technology the company has long used to move real-world data onto blockchains, and points it at a new and fast-growing user: autonomous software agents.
The launch responds to a simple shift in who uses online data. For years, application programming interfaces — the connections that let one piece of software pull data from another — have been designed for human developers, who read a documentation page, create an account and copy in an access key. AI agents work differently. They read a machine-readable description instead of a web page, pay for each request rather than buying a monthly plan, and complete transactions without a person approving every step. AirnodeHub is designed for that kind of user from the start.
Each service listed on the marketplace is a live connection that describes itself, sets its own per-request price, and attaches a cryptographic signature to every answer it returns. That signature is the central feature: because it is tied to the data, an answer an agent received earlier can still be checked later, and its origin can be confirmed. An agent can point at the marketplace, describe what it needs in plain language, and receive suggested requests with the details filled in, the price to run them, and the identity that will have signed the result.
The service is powered by Airnode, API3’s data-delivery software, which takes an existing API and adds two things: a description an agent can understand without human help, and a signature on every response so the information carries proof of where it came from. Providers keep their own customers, pricing and branding while gaining access to a new category of buyer.
At launch, the marketplace lists roughly three dozen data services spanning finance and market data, web and news search, weather, air travel, earthquake tracking, health information, sports and mapping, including public datasets from bodies such as the United States Geological Survey. Each listing shows whether the original provider of the data operates it directly, in which case the signature traces all the way back to the source.
Payments use x402, an open standard that lets software pay for individual requests over the web, so an agent can settle for exactly what it uses with a digital wallet rather than a subscription. Agents built on a common connection standard known as the Model Context Protocol can link to the marketplace directly and use the entire catalogue as a set of ready-made tools.
AirnodeHub builds on the approach that made API3 known in its field. The company was an early proponent of having data providers run their own infrastructure rather than relying on intermediaries, and it operates more than 100 data feeds across dozens of blockchain networks. The same idea — that data is most trustworthy when the source signs it — now underpins the new marketplace.
API3 has been open about the product being at an early stage. It is in early access, the listings are free to use for now, and the company currently builds and hosts the connections itself while it prepares to let providers run their own. The direction, however, is clear: a marketplace where the original producer of data is paid for each answer, and where an agent can prove the origin of everything it relies on.
More information is available at api3.org, and the marketplace can be explored at airnodehub.api3.org.
About API3
API3 is a decentralized oracle project that connects real-world data directly to blockchains and, increasingly, to AI agents through first-party, cryptographically signed data. It pioneered the first-party oracle model — in which data providers operate their own oracle nodes rather than relying on third-party intermediaries — and maintains more than 100 data feeds across dozens of networks. Through its Oracle Extractable Value (OEV) mechanism, API3 returns value generated by oracle updates to the applications that create it. Its latest initiative, AirnodeHub, extends the same source-signed data model to the emerging agent economy. API3 is governed by the API3 DAO. Learn more at api3.org and airnodehub.api3.org.
