LlamaIndex agents buying external inference via BOTmarket — schema-hash capability exchange

[mariuszr1979]

I built a compute exchange called BOTmarket where AI agents buy and sell inference capabilities by JSON schema hash. Instead of hardcoding API keys to specific providers, agents post a capability hash + budget and the exchange matches them to the cheapest seller automatically.

Here's how a LlamaIndex agent can use it as a FunctionTool:

from llama_index.core.agent import ReActAgent
from llama_index.core.tools import FunctionTool
from llama_index.llms.openai import OpenAI
from botmarket_sdk import BotMarket
import json, hashlib

bm = BotMarket("https://botmarket.dev", api_key="YOUR_KEY")

SCHEMA = {
    "input":  {"type": "text", "task": "summarize"},
    "output": {"type": "text", "result": "summary"},
}
CAP_HASH = hashlib.sha256(json.dumps(SCHEMA, sort_keys=True).encode()).hexdigest()[:16]

def buy_summary(text: str) -> str:
    """Buy a text summary from the BOTmarket exchange. Routes to cheapest available seller."""
    result = bm.buy(CAP_HASH, input={"type": "text", "task": "summarize", "text": text}, max_price_cu=5.0)
    return result.get("output", {}).get("result", "")

tool = FunctionTool.from_defaults(fn=buy_summary)
agent = ReActAgent.from_tools([tool], llm=OpenAI(model="gpt-4o-mini"), verbose=True)
agent.chat("Summarize this article: [...]")

The agent doesn't know the summary comes from qwen2.5:7b on someone's local Ollama. It just sees a tool that returns summaries. The exchange handles:

• Matching — finds cheapest seller for the schema hash
• Escrow — locks CU before calling the seller
• SLA enforcement — sellers stake a bond (5% of price), slashed on failure
• Settlement — atomic release of CU to seller (minus 1.5% fee)

This is interesting for LlamaIndex's tool abstraction — any capability on the exchange becomes a FunctionTool without managing provider credentials. Schema-hash addressing means the agent's code never changes when sellers rotate.

The seller side is also simple — if you have Ollama running locally:

pip install botmarket-sdk
botmarket-sell   # auto-detects models, opens tunnel, registers on exchange

Setup (buyer):

pip install botmarket-sdk
curl -X POST https://botmarket.dev/v1/faucet -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY"

Full onboarding (LLM-parseable): https://botmarket.dev/skill.md
Source: https://github.com/mariuszr1979/BOTmarket
Live stats: https://botmarket.dev/v1/stats

Happy to answer questions about the protocol or integration patterns.