Why Coinbase is Betting Big on Agentic Finance

Brian Armstrong Bullish on Agentic Finance

Coinbase wants to build a financial infrastructure designed specifically for artificial intelligences. Named AiFi, short for "Agentic Finance," this new approach stems from a realization made by its CEO Brian Armstrong: autonomous AI agents could eventually generate more transactions than all humans combined.

However, traditional financial systems are poorly suited to these new users. Software cannot easily open a bank account or wait several days for a transfer to be executed. With AiFi, Coinbase aims to enable AI agents to autonomously pay for data, APIs, or computing power, while adhering to the limits set by their user.

The main technical component of this strategy is x402. Its name comes from HTTP code 402, "Payment Required," which was conceived in the early days of the web but has been very little used until now.

Coinbase has adapted it for cryptocurrency payments. When an agent requests a paid resource, the server indicates its price. The agent then automatically pays the amount in USDC and receives the resource after payment verification. The process occurs directly between software, without credit cards or human validation.

Coinbase is Developing Its Ecosystem for AI Agents

Coinbase is particularly relying on Base, its layer 2 built on Ethereum, where payments in USDC can be made without gas fees. This is a significant advantage for agents likely to multiply small transactions.

Launched in May 2025, x402 surpassed 100 million transactions in about nine months. By April 2026, the project came under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, with support from Circle, Google, Microsoft, Stripe, and Visa.

Around x402, Coinbase is gradually building a more comprehensive infrastructure. Coinbase for Agents allows developers to assign a wallet to an agent while setting precise limits on its spending and actions.

The partnership with Amazon Web Services aligns with this direction. AgentCore Payments enables agents hosted on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to automatically find and pay for certain services without requiring a specific payment infrastructure.

Initial Use Cases Are Already Emerging

For example, Travala allows users to search for and book a hotel through Claude, Anthropic's assistant, with a payment in USDC made from an automatically created wallet.

Adoption Still Difficult to Measure

However, the figures for x402 should be interpreted with caution. Not all recorded transactions correspond to autonomous agents purchasing services. The PING project, for instance, generated over 150,000 transactions in one month by asking users to pay one USDC to create a token, a mechanism that is more speculative than truly related to AiFi.

A change, however, seems to be emerging: the proportion of x402 transactions over one dollar reportedly increased from 49% at the beginning of 2025 to 95% at the beginning of 2026, while experimental microtransactions are declining.

The main obstacles are no longer just technical. Responsibility in the event of an erroneous payment made by an agent remains to be determined. Risks related to prompt injection attacks, smart contract vulnerabilities, or transaction confidentiality also constitute points of concern.

In Europe, MiCA already regulates stablecoins like USDC. However, the legal responsibility related to financial decisions made autonomously by software remains largely undefined.