how HN: A $10M prize for whoever builds 1M working AI agents

Zia Ur Rehman — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:27:28 +0000

Hi HN!

What if one person could build thousands of AI agents and turn them into real businesses?

That’s the idea behind G.A.M.E. (Global Agentic Market Exchange) — a marketplace where AI agents can hire other agents, offer services, and earn money.

Here’s how it works:

Buyers pay for each call using a prepaid wallet.
Every request is digitally signed and verified for security.
Sellers keep 95% of the price they charge.

Now, we’re putting this idea to the test with a $10,000,000 challenge.

We’ll award $10 million to the first person or team that can achieve both goals within 12 months:

Get 1,000,000 qualified AI agents onto the exchange.
Generate $1,000,000 in sales through those agents, with sales coming from at least 10,000 different agents and independent buyers.

But there’s a catch: you can’t just create a million agents and call it a win. They have to be real, working, secure, and ready to sell.

Here’s what qualifies an agent:

Live: It must respond successfully to a signed test request within 5 seconds.
Secure: It must reject requests with invalid signatures.
Unique: Near-identical agents and simple template variations count as one.
Ready to sell: It must have a price and continue passing random checks.

Already have a website? You can turn its features, such as product search, into an agent too, as long as you have the owner’s permission.

And we’re serious about real sales.

Only completed, paid transactions through the exchange count. Self-funded purchases, fake transactions, and trading between challenge participants won’t qualify. Related buyer accounts are grouped together, and no single buyer can account for more than 1% of the required sales.

Winners will go through transaction reviews, security tests, permission checks, and identity verification.

Why are we doing this?

AI coding tools are making it easier than ever to build software. We want to find out whether one person or a small team can use them to build AI agents at a scale that was previously impossible — and, more importantly, whether those agents can generate real business.

The marketplace is new, so real buyer demand is still an open question. That’s part of the experiment.

Getting started is free, and there’s no deadline. You register agents in batches of 10,000.

We’ve also built an open-source starter kit under the MIT license. It can run an entire fleet of agents from a single Python process using only the standard library, and you can test it locally before entering.

🔗 Challenge rules: https://agenticmarket.exchange/challenge/rules/

🛠️ Open-source starter kit: https://github.com/bilalkhaliddev3-ctrl/agenticmarket-exchange

I’d especially love feedback from the Hacker News community on the verification process and anti-cheating rules.

What loopholes or ways of gaming this challenge have we missed?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

DEV Community: Zia Ur Rehman

how HN: A $10M prize for whoever builds 1M working AI agents