Coinbase CEO Criticizes Crypto Firms’ AI Pivots

Coinbase’s CEO has criticized cryptocurrency companies who switch their focus from blockchain tech to artificial intelligence (AI).

“‘If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI.’ I used to hear versions of this, and it’s the wrong way to think about the world. It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking,” Brian Armstrong wrote in a post on the social media platform X Sunday (July 27). “Crypto is a general purpose technology. It’s infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn’t compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It’s an *and*, not an *or*.”

AI being a “megatrend” does not detract from crypto but in act adds to its importance, Armstrong added.

“AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will eventually transact far more per day than all humans combined,” he wrote. “They can’t open a bank account, they can’t wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country. They need real time programmable money (and that’s crypto).”

These agents will need to “hold funds and pay for things on their own,” Armstrong continued, noting Coinbase’s involvement in x402, an agentic protocol that he said now powers most agentic payments.

“Agents will also engage in trading and act as a financial advisor,” he said. “They will raise or borrow money for new projects they are undertaking. They will eliminate tasks for us around tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill pay.”

PYMNTS noted as much in a report on x402 earlier this month, saying the initiative gives CFOs and merchants a glimpse into a new reality for B2B.

“For CFOs, the more immediate question is not whether an AI agent can buy sneakers,” that report said. “It is whether software usage, data calls, model inference, content access and machine-to-machine work can become payable events inside normal business operations.”

If a compliance bot gets the attention of a sanction database or an internal AI agent calls a premium API to carry out a treasury task, “x402 suggests those moments could carry payment instructions by default,” PYMNTS added.

“The x402 protocol revives the long-unused HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code and turns it into a payment protocol for the internet,” the report continued. “That matters because the object being sold is not necessarily a product. It may be a request, an answer, a data pull, a support escalation, a chunk of compute, or a software action. The request becomes the transaction.”