Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed back against calls to pivot cryptocurrencies to artificial intelligence, arguing that AI agents will instead drive demand for crypto-based financial services.
Armstrong was at Company X on Sunday to promote Agent Finance (AiFi) and highlight Coinbase’s Base Network. $USDC x402 is used as an autonomous machine-to-machine payment infrastructure.
“The fact that AI is a megatrend has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies,” Armstrong wrote, because AI agents will require programmable money rather than the rails of traditional banks. “If anything, it makes cryptocurrencies even more important,” he added.
His comments come as crypto companies increasingly position blockchain networks as payment infrastructure for AI agents, with agent payment activity on Base exceeding 100 million in June.
How Coinbase’s AiFi stack came together
Armstrong’s AiFi vision centers around the idea of AI agents actively participating in the digital economy, making payments and interacting with financial services without human intervention.
Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer 2 network designed to make on-chain applications faster and cheaper to use. The network was built as a general-purpose blockchain infrastructure, not specifically for AI payments.
Two years later, Coinbase introduced x402, a payments protocol built around the HTTP “402 Payment Required” standard that enables automatic stablecoin payments between software applications. This protocol allows AI agents and other autonomous systems to pay for digital resources such as APIs and data without using traditional accounts or manual checkout flows.
$USDCis a dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in 2018 by Center Consortium backed by Circle and Coinbase, and is one of the assets used for x402 payments, allowing software agents to conduct automated transactions.
base, x402, and $USDC Together, these form the core of Coinbase’s current approach to building infrastructure for proxy payments.
Coinbase is scheduled to release second-quarter earnings on Thursday. Analysts on average estimate sales at $1.29 billion, with sales down 13.8% year-over-year, according to Yahoo Finance data. Earnings per share are expected to be flat.
Basic agent activity exceeds 100 million transactions
Chainaosis reported in June that agent payments on Base via x402 exceeded 100 million transactions within about nine months of activity.
The analytics firm tracked this activity by identifying x402-related payment flows on-chain, and said transactions worth at least $1 accounted for 95% of total remittances.
Source: Chainalysis
Chainalies also found that agent payment wallets are typically newer, hold more asset types, and hold smaller balances than the average Base user.
Cointelegraph reached out to Chainalysis for the latest x402 activity numbers and details on its tracking methodology, but the company did not respond by the time of publication.
