Coinbase Bets on ‘Agentic Finance’ as AI Software Drives Machine-to-Machine Crypto Payments

Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong has rejected claims that artificial intelligence is dampening interest in cryptocurrency, asserting that autonomous AI software will instead serve as a major driver of digital asset demand.

In public statements on Sunday, Armstrong outlined a vision for “agentic finance”—often abbreviated as AiFi—positioning blockchain infrastructure as the primary settlement layer for automated machine-to-machine transactions.

Writing on social platform X, Armstrong argued that autonomous AI agents executing tasks without human oversight cannot rely on legacy banking rails. Traditional financial institutions operate around manual approvals, identity checks, and business hours, creating structural bottlenecks for software programs that require immediate, high-frequency payments for computing resources, data feeds, and application programming interfaces (APIs).

To support this ecosystem, Coinbase has assembled a technical stack centered on its Base Layer-2 network, the USDC stablecoin, and the x402 payment standard.

Base was introduced in 2023 as an Ethereum Layer-2 scaling network designed to reduce gas fees and speed up transaction processing. While launched as general-purpose blockchain infrastructure, the network has increasingly become a hub for automated software interactions.

Key to Coinbase’s agentic push is x402, an open payment protocol that builds upon the HTTP status code “402 Payment Required.” Reserved in early web standards for internet microtransactions, the 402 code remained largely dormant for decades due to the absence of native digital money. The x402 standard enables software applications to execute automated stablecoin payments directly within web requests, bypassing traditional merchant accounts and manual checkout interfaces.

Transactions over the protocol primarily utilize USDC, the US dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in 2018 by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium.

Adoption metrics indicate expanding activity for automated payments. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported that machine-driven transactions on Base using x402 surpassed 100 million within approximately nine months of operation. Transactions valued at $1 or more accounted for 95% of the total value transferred through the protocol.

Chainalysis also found that wallets associated with autonomous software agents displayed distinct characteristics compared to human users on Base, tending to be newer, holding smaller average token balances, and maintaining a broader variety of asset types to pay for diverse digital services.

The emphasis on AI payment infrastructure arrives as Coinbase prepares to release its second-quarter earnings report on Thursday. Wall Street consensus estimates project revenue of $1.29 billion, representing a 13.8% decline from the same period last year, with earnings per share anticipated to remain flat.