Coinbase Bets on AI Agents to Power Payments Growth

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is looking to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence agent payments at a time when its core business is being impacted by the crypto market downturn, The Information reported Wednesday (March 18).

Shan Aggarwal, chief business officer at Coinbase, said of the firm’s agentic payments projects: “It’s certainly one of our top priorities as a company,” according to the report.

Coinbase aims to make the USDC stablecoin and the Base blockchain key parts of agentic payments. The company also developed the payments protocol x402 last year to enable websites to accept payments from AI agents, the report said.

This report came on the same day that Stripe and Tempo announced that they co-authored an open standard for machine payments called the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP).

MPP provides a standard way for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically and enables machine payments to work across services and payment rails.

Visa said Wednesday that it is supporting MPP by enabling card-based payments for trusted autonomous agent payments.

The report also came a day after World announced that it collaborated with Coinbase to introduce a solution for the agentic web that turns AI agents into trusted shoppers.

The solution, AgentKit, combines the x402 protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare with the World ID developed by World.

In February, Coinbase said it developed the first crypto wallet infrastructure designed for AI agents and that these Agentic Wallets let users quickly equip agents with autonomous spending, earning and trading capabilities.

Coinbase introduced in October a tool called Payments MCP that supports agentic commerce by giving AI agents access to on-chain financial tools like wallets, on-ramps and stablecoin payments.

It was reported in May 2024 that Coinbase saw a potential shake-up as the crypto market matured and that the company was diversifying its revenue sources. At the time, its revenue sources beyond trading fees included revenue share on USDC and revenue from Base.

PYMNTS reported in October that Coinbase’s “Everything Exchange” concept was gaining momentum as the company focused on shipping innovative products and focusing on three layers of activity: trading, financial services and applications.

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