coinbase on Thursday announced a new tool that gives AI agents the ability to trade and transact directly on behalf of users. This represents a broader bet that AI agents will become the primary interface for people’s financial activities.
Coinbase for Agents will initially enable agents like ChatGPT and Claude to perform cryptocurrency transactions using natural language instructions. For example, clients can encourage agents to rebalance portfolios, identify trading opportunities, execute strategies, and manage positions over time. Eventually, we plan to extend these features to stocks and forecasts as well.
In addition, Coinbase’s machine-to-machine payments protocol, called x402, allows agents to make payments directly for digital services, such as paywall research, data APIs, and on-demand computing, without human involvement, and execute transactions based on those insights. The company views this stage of agent payments, where customers can avoid the need to manage traditional logins and subscriptions, as a precursor to agent shopping, where agents browse, find the best deals, select and purchase on your behalf.
“The whole idea is to give agents access to funds and, through that financial independence, improve their ability to interact with just about anything on the internet,” Lincoln Ma, head of AI products at Coinbase, told CNBC. “In the 2010s, every internet company was moving from the desktop and web to a mobile environment, and now in the late 2020s we are seeing exactly the same thing happen, with agents becoming the new major economic actors on the internet.”
This announcement comes in the midst of an AI boom where agent systems are one of the hottest investment themes. At the same time, the crypto sector remains in a relatively subdued recessionary slump, and this launch is as much a contrarian push into a softer trading environment as it is a bet on AI to match the hype.
Coinbase earns transaction fees on trades executed by agents, and for payments, it captures commissions and spreads based on the movement of USDC, which acts as the settlement currency for agent trades. We are also benefiting from increased transaction volume on Base, our internal layer 2 blockchain that underpins these transactions.
The x402 protocol was created in May 2025 and has seen more than 100 million transactions since its debut, Murr said. According to x402scan.com, approximately 157,000 agents have acted as buyers using the protocol in the past 30 days.
“We saw immediate demand and interest in the ability for agents to pay fees autonomously. It was a huge wake-up moment for us about the ability of agents to become the new primary financial entity on the Internet,” he said.
