New York state assemblymember and congressional candidate Alex Bores has proposed an AI dividend program aimed at addressing possible job losses linked to artificial intelligence. 

He presented the plan as a way to prepare US workers and households for changes that may come as AI adoption spreads across industries.

In a post on X, Bores said the proposal would create direct payments for Americans if AI leads to major labor displacement. He said the goal is to prepare for what he called ”potential large-scale displacement of human labor by artificial intelligence.”

According to Bores, the proposed AI dividend would draw funding from several sources. These include taxes on AI use, equity stakes in major AI companies, and tax reforms tied to the treatment of labor and capital.

Bores said the plan is designed to respond if AI lifts productivity while concentrating more wealth in fewer hands. The proposal states, ”if AI dramatically increases productivity and concentrates wealth, the American people have a stake in those gains.” It also describes the dividend as ”not a punishment for innovation” but ”an insurance policy.”

Meanwhile, the plan goes beyond direct payments. It also calls for investments in workforce transition, education, training, and oversight systems tied to AI safety. That structure suggests the proposal is meant to address both income support and longer-term labor market adjustments.

Bores is promoting the policy as part of his campaign for Congress. That means the proposal’s path forward may depend in part on the outcome of his race and whether he can build broader political support for the idea.

Debate over AI job losses remains unsettled

The proposal comes as concerns about AI-led layoffs continue to grow. A recent Goldman Sachs report said AI adoption contributed to the loss of about 16,000 jobs per month over the past year, adding to worries that automation may reduce hiring in some sectors.

At the same time, other research points to a more mixed picture. Morgan Stanley said in an April 14 report that AI’s effect on the labor market has been ”modest so far.” 

The firm said evidence of broad job losses remains limited and noted that past technological shifts often created new jobs over time, even when they replaced others in the short term.

Major US technology firms such as Amazon, Meta, Intel, and Microsoft have already cut thousands of jobs or reportedly planned cuts tied to AI-driven efficiency. 

That backdrop has given more attention to proposals such as the AI dividend as policymakers weigh how to respond to the next stage of automation.

A chunk of the Kelp DAO haul is no longer going anywhere.

Arbitrum’s Security Council froze 30,766 ETH worth roughly $71 million on Monday night, moving funds linked to Saturday’s $292 million rsETH exploit into an intermediary wallet that can only be accessed through further Arbitrum governance action.

rsETH is a liquid restaking token issued by KelpDAO and represents a user’s position in restaked ether (ETH).

The council said it acted on input from law enforcement regarding the exploiter’s identity and executed the freeze “without impacting any Arbitrum users or applications.”

The transfer completed at 11:26 p.m. ET on April 20, according to Arbitrum’s statement on X. The stolen funds are no longer controllable by the address that originally held them.

The move recovers about a quarter of the total amount drained from Kelp’s LayerZero-powered bridge on Saturday, when attackers pulled 116,500 rsETH by exploiting compromised verifier infrastructure. LayerZero attributed the attack with preliminary confidence to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.

Arbitrum is a layer-2 blockchain, meaning a network built on top of Ethereum that processes transactions more cheaply and settles them back to the main chain. Its Security Council is a group of elected signers with emergency powers to take protective action in exactly this kind of scenario, though governance-level interventions on user funds remain rare and controversial because they introduce a degree of discretionary control over an otherwise permissionless network.

The freeze leaves Kelp with a partial recovery option on top of whatever else law enforcement and chain-tracing firms can claw back.

It also escalates the ongoing dispute between Kelp and LayerZero over who bears responsibility for the exploit, since any broader socialization of remaining losses now has a $71 million offset to work with before legal coordination, insurance, or treasury contributions come into play.

Kelp has said it is coordinating with ecosystem partners on a recovery fund and weighing next steps on unpausing, loss socialization, and legal coordination with affected counterparties. LayerZero has not publicly commented on the Arbitrum freeze.

Whether more stolen funds can be frozen depends on where else the attacker moved rsETH or its derivatives before consolidation, and whether other chains with similar emergency powers choose to act on their portions of the flow.

Coinbase-backed AI payments protocol x402 has launched Agentic.market, a new platform built to help AI agents find and use compatible online services. 

The launch adds a discovery layer to the protocol by offering a single place where users and AI agents can search for tools that support x402-based payments.

Coinbase product lead Nick Prince said the platform aims to “give humans and their agents access to thousands of services, with zero API keys required.” He described Agentic.market as a storefront where users can discover, compare, and use services that work with x402.

Prince said the platform addresses a gap in the AI agent market. He said many users have depended on scattered information and informal recommendations to find services that AI agents can access. Agentic.market is designed to solve that issue by organizing those services in one place.

The marketplace includes services and websites that AI agents can use, such as CoinGecko, Google Flights, and X. Prince also said the platform includes a web interface for people and a programming layer that lets AI agents search, filter, and connect to services on their own during operation.

Additionally, the x402 protocol launched in May 2025 and allows AI agents to make internet payments using stablecoins. It takes its name from the rarely used HTTP status code “402 Payment Required.” Coinbase and its partners present the protocol as infrastructure for AI-driven online commerce.

Prince said the platform gives an AI agent “skills,” or code that explains how to use a service. He added that agents also get a wallet, which allows them to “buy services and also sell services.” This setup is meant to let agents complete more tasks without requiring direct human control for each action.

Support grows across tech and payments firms

Earlier this month, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services backed the launch of the x402 Foundation, which will govern the protocol. American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Cloudflare, Shopify, Stripe, Circle, Base, Polygon Labs, the Solana Foundation, Thirdweb, and KakaoPay also expressed support for the initiative.

“There will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon,” noted Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire made a similar forecast in January, saying “literally billions of AI agents” could transact on blockchains within three to five years. The launch of Agentic.market places x402 more directly within that growing AI payments push.

Coinbase-backed x402 has unveiled Agentic.market, a dedicated marketplace aimed at increasing the usefulness of AI agents by aggregating thousands of apps and services that agents can access without any API keys. The rollout positions the platform as a central hub for agents to discover, evaluate, and deploy capabilities across a standardized payments layer.

Coinbase product lead Nick Prince described Agentic.market in a video posted on X as a storefront for discovering, comparing, and using x402 services. The marketplace is designed to give both humans and their AI agents access to a wide range of tools—from data feeds to consumer apps—without the friction of managing API credentials.

A storefront for discovering, comparing, and using x402 services. Thousands of services. Zero API keys. Powered by x402.

Prince added that the market offers a web interface for humans to browse and assess services, alongside a programming layer that lets AI agents autonomously search, filter, and integrate new capabilities at runtime without human intervention. Each AI agent is equipped with “skills”—the code that defines how to use a service—and a wallet that enables it to buy and sell services within the marketplace.

The launch comes as the x402 protocol, introduced by Coinbase in May 2025, enables AI agents to conduct internet payments using stablecoins and has begun to gain broad industry support. The broader ecosystem envisions a growing flow of autonomous commerce as more companies recognize the potential for AI-powered agents to operate across digital services and platforms.

Key takeaways

• Agentic.market consolidates thousands of x402-enabled services into a single storefront, removing API-key frictions for AI agents and human users.
• The marketplace features a dual interface: a consumer-friendly web frontend and a programming layer that empowers agents to autonomously extend their capabilities at runtime.
• Backing and governance for the x402 framework have grown beyond Coinbase, with major tech and financial players signaling support and participation.
• x402’s core proposition—AI agents transacting with stablecoins—aims to accelerate the shift toward an “agent economy” where autonomous services perform on-chain payments at scale.
• Industry attention is rising as hundreds of thousands of AI agents reportedly transact in hundreds of millions of dollars in volume, signaling real-world usage beyond experimental deployments.

Backing, governance, and the broader ecosystem

The x402 initiative has drawn notable interest from major technology and payments players. In a broader push to formalize an AI-agent payments fabric, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services backed the creation of the x402 Foundation to govern the protocol. Alongside this governance push, a broad coalition of firms signaled initial intent and support, including American Express, Mastercard, Visa, Cloudflare, Shopify, Stripe, Circle, Base, Polygon Labs, the Solana Foundation, Thirdweb, and KakaoPay. The combined support underscores a growing belief within the industry that AI-driven commerce will rely on interoperable, on-chain payments and standardized agent capabilities.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has framed the development as an inflection point for online transactions, noting that “there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon.” The sentiment echoes earlier comments from Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire about billions of AI agents potentially transacting on blockchains within a few years.

The market’s governance and ecosystem-building efforts were highlighted in coverage of big-tech backing for the x402 protocol. Prior reporting noted that major firms were aligning around the idea of standardized, agent-enabled payments and a framework to manage governance and interoperability across services.

Why the Agentic market matters for builders and users

Agentic.market could materially lower the cost of integrating AI agents with external services. By providing a centralized catalog and a runtime-capable programming layer, developers can more readily enable agents to perform tasks that require real-time data, booking, or account actions without developers building bespoke connectors for each service. For investors, the marketplace also represents a signal that the agent economy is moving from concept to execution, with concrete storefronts and programmable workflows delivering measurable transaction volume.

For users and enterprises, the marketplace promises increased transparency and comparability: agents can be evaluated against a catalog of services, with standardized interfaces and a shared payments layer. This could accelerate adoption by reducing technical debt and giving buyers and sellers clearer paths to interoperability and monetization.

That said, the shift toward autonomous, on-chain payment flows will invite scrutiny over security, governance, and the reliability of agents operating without a human in the loop. The coming months will reveal how the ecosystem manages trust, fraud prevention, and service quality across thousands of partners in a single platform.

What to watch next

Key questions for the coming period include how rapidly enterprises formalize usage of x402-enabled services, whether Agentic.market expands its catalog to include more partners such as data providers or e-commerce tools, and how regulators respond to broader autonomous-payment activity on-chain. The size and pace of actual transaction volume via AI agents will be a telling gauge of the market’s momentum beyond pilot deployments.

As developers and investors assess the trajectory, the continued alignment between large tech platforms, payment rails, and AI-service providers will be crucial to turning the agent-economy thesis into sustained, scalable adoption.

Watch for further updates on how the Agentic.market catalog evolves, how AI agents demonstrate governance-compatible behavior at scale, and which new services become first-class citizens in the x402 ecosystem.

OpenGradient’s AI‑focused OPG token will launch via an exclusive Binance Wallet and PancakeSwap TGE on April 21, with access gated by Binance Alpha points.

Binance Wallet will jointly launch the exclusive Token Generation Event for OpenGradient with PancakeSwap on April 21, 2026, positioning the AI‑focused blockchain project as the next test case for Binance’s Alpha points launch model. In an announcement on Binance Square, the team said the event, billed as the “46th exclusive TGE,” will run from 9:00 to 11:00 UTC, with token claims and trading set to open at 11:00 UTC.

According to Binance Wallet, “eligible participants are required to use Binance Alpha points to join,” making OPG’s launch effectively a loyalty‑driven sale rather than a traditional public ICO. OpenGradient has already deployed its OPG token contract on BNB Smart Chain, with one Binance post noting that “99% [of the supply is] listed on Binance Alpha” ahead of the April 21 issuance.

OpenGradient describes itself as a decentralized “computational layer for verifiable AI,” built as a dedicated co‑processor network that provides model inference via GPU and trusted execution environment (TEE) nodes for applications, blockchains and agents. The project says each inference is accompanied by “cryptographic verification proofs for each inference,” allowing external parties to independently verify models, inputs and outputs in a bid to solve the black‑box problem in AI.

In a recent funding announcement, OpenGradient disclosed that it has raised a total of $9.5 million from investors including a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel and Foresight Ventures. A separate tokenomics post on Binance Square states that OPG will have a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, distributed across ecosystem (40%), foundation (15%), core contributors (15%), investors and advisers (10%), staking rewards (10%), liquidity and token launch (6%) and airdrop (4%).

The team says 10% of the ecosystem allocation will unlock at TGE, with the remaining 30% linearly released over 60 months, while foundation tokens see 33.33% unlocked at TGE and the rest vesting over 48 months. Core contributors and investor tranches carry a 12‑month cliff followed by 36 months of linear unlocking, and both the 6% liquidity/token‑launch slice and 4% airdrop are “fully unlocked at TGE.”

OpenGradient has also opened an OPG airdrop registration portal that remains live until April 20, with claims beginning on April 21 alongside the Binance Wallet and PancakeSwap event. In a Binance Square post, the team said its network “currently serves over 2 million users, processing over 2 million verifiable inferences and generating more than 500,000 proofs,” framing the TGE as a way to decentralize ownership around an already active AI infrastructure layer.

Crypto lobby Coin Center has expanded on its argument that software code is free speech and should be protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, amid continued uncertainty over whether crypto developers could be liable for how their inventions are used.

In a report published Monday, Coin Center Executive Director Peter Van Valkenburgh and Director of Research Lizandro Pieper said writing and publishing crypto software code is the same as writing a book or publishing a recipe.

The pair argued that the First Amendment, which protects individuals’ freedom of speech and expression, offers strict constitutional protection for developers who only publish and maintain software. 

“They are speakers and inventors, not agents, custodians, or fiduciaries. Extending pre-registration or licensing requirements to this speech activity drops the historical logic of financial oversight and imposes a classic prior restraint on activities that are primarily speech and expression—which is almost always unconstitutional,” they added.

Crypto software developers have been seeking legal protections to shield themselves from criminal liability over the software they create. Last year saw several high-profile convictions of crypto developers based on how their software was used, including the trial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm.

Regulation applies when devs interact directly with users

Van Valkenburgh and Pieper said the paper is aimed at providing a framework for courts and regulators to distinguish between protected software publication and a developer’s professional conduct. 

They argued that a developer crosses into regulatable conduct when controlling user assets, executing transactions for users or making decisions on users’ behalf.

“Lower court confusion over the distinction between conduct and speech naturally found in software publishing has fueled the development of what might be called a functional code theory of diminished First Amendment protection,” they said.

“Some courts have suggested that because software can be executed to produce real-world effects, it resembles conduct rather than speech,” they added.

“We argue that such activities are pure speech and that the Supreme Court’s existing jurisprudence insists on this interpretation even if some lower courts have gone astray.”

They cited the 1985 case of Lowe v. SEC, in which the Supreme Court found that a publisher that does not hold assets on behalf of a client or take action on the client’s behalf is protected by free speech and does not count as practicing a regulated profession. 

Crypto developers can’t be used as scapegoats

In some cases, crypto software has eliminated certain traditional middlemen, with self-custody and peer-to-peer transactions removing the need for a central authority to send funds or hold them. 

Traditionally, financial institutions acting on a user’s behalf as intermediaries are regulated by governments and required to hold licenses.

Related: Coin Center urges Senate not to axe crypto developer protection bill

Van Valkenburgh and Pieper said that while it is challenging to build regulatory frameworks around new technology, declaring software developers to be middlemen for “administrative convenience” is not the answer either. 

“Crypto software does not necessitate the invention of new legal doctrines or novel carveouts. It requires the faithful application of settled First Amendment principles to a new technological context,” they added.

“In the age of computers, where software is the primary means for expressing ideas and organizing economic life, those principles matter more, not less. Writing and publishing code is speech. And in a free society, speech cannot be licensed into silence.”

Storm was convicted last year on charges of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, but his lawyers have been working on a motion to dismiss using the Supreme Court case, Cox Communications Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, to argue he had no intent to participate in the crimes of which he is accused 

The co-founders of privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet Samourai Wallet were also found guilty on the same charge and were sentenced to between four and five years in prison.

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