Circle integrates Venice into Agent Marketplace for AI services

Circle’s Agent Marketplace just picked up one of crypto’s more interesting AI startups. Venice.ai, the privacy-centric AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, is now listed as a service provider in Circle’s rapidly expanding hub for AI agent transactions. The integration means AI agents can now tap into Venice’s creative and inference services, think image generation, video creation, and access to a library of over 200 AI models, and pay for it all in USDC without needing API keys, subscriptions, or even an account. What the Agent Marketplace actually does Circle launched its Agent Stack on May 11, 2026, building out infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents to discover, access, and pay for services on their own. The Agent Marketplace is the centerpiece: a structured directory where services are screened, compliance-checked, and made available through a keyless Discovery API. The marketplace has grown from over 600 live services at launch to more than 900 in just a couple of months. That’s a roughly 50% jump in available services, spanning 15-plus blockchains. Payments flow through the x402 protocol, which handles wallet authorization for USDC transactions on chains like Bas...