Coinbase Debuts Crypto Wallet Infrastructure for AI Agents

Coinbase says it has developed the first crypto wallet infrastructure designed for AI agents.

The cryptocurrency exchange says its Agentic Wallets, announced Wednesday (Feb. 11), let users quickly equip agents with autonomous spending, earning and trading capabilities.

“AI agents are everywhere – answering questions, summarizing documents, and assisting with tasks,” Coinbase wrote on its blog.

“But today’s agents hit a wall when they need to actually do something that requires money. They can recommend a trade, but they can’t execute it. They can identify an API they need, but they can’t pay for it. They’re stuck waiting for human approval at every financial decision point.”

Coinbase says this new offering builds on its AgentKit, created to build wallets into agents. Agentic Wallets, the company added, were designed to “give any agent a wallet.” The project is based around x402, the payments protocol for autonomous AI use cases.

“Already battle-tested with over 50M transactions, x402 enables machine-to-machine payments, API paywalls, and programmatic resource access without human intervention,” Coinbase said.

The wallets also offer users protections, such as session caps that let them determine the maximum an agent can spend per session, as well as controls on individual transaction sizes.

The new offering follows last year’s launch of “Payments MCP,” a Coinbase tool that supports agentic commerce by giving AI agents access to on-chain financial tools such as wallets, on-ramps and stablecoin payments.

PYMNTS wrote last year about the importance of digital identity measures as AI agents take on more tasks in the Web3 space.

In this environment, “identity is portable, composable and verifiable,” that report said. AI agents will need to navigate this new landscape “with clarity and consistency, whether they are interacting with humans, smart contracts or each other.”

Much like websites have domain names and SSL certificates to signal trust, AI agents will need identity protocols to demonstrate their legitimacy and intent. This could be especially crucial in high-stakes areas like finance and payments, where trust is key and failure can be costly.

“Every crypto protocol needs to consider how this new technology will fit into their operations,” Harrison Seletsky, director at SPACE ID, told PYMNTS in an interview. “Verifiable on-chain identities will simplify AI-to-human and AI-to-AI interactions, making them safer by giving AI agents a humanly recognizable name, thereby cleaning out bots and bad actors from misrepresenting themselves.”