The rapid rise of AI agents is starting to change the way payments are made online, making crypto infrastructure a natural fit, according to Coinbase’s Jesse Pollack.
“What was nearly impossible nine months ago is now completely possible,” Pollack said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the acceleration capabilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, the need for a native method of trading becomes clear.
“Agents are defined by software and operating software, and as software, they want money,” said Pollack, who will speak at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
This shift has sparked interest in so-called “payments on behalf of” where AI systems can autonomously pay for services such as data access, computing, and travel booking.
Pollack said he expects x402 to be a key part of that stack. x402 is an open source payments protocol developed by Coinbase and partners including Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard that enables on-demand API payments without subscriptions or traditional billing systems.
Instead of relying on traditional rails, blockchain-based payments allow agents to “move funds around the world instantly and essentially for free by making a single API call or smart contract call,” Pollack said.
Initial traction is already visible. Pollack said about $48 million in payments have flowed through X402 to date, with about 95% of the transactions taking place on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network founded by Pollack and cultivated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also rapidly expanding, with integrations across AI providers, data platforms, and travel services available directly to agents.
Pollack said the long-term vision is to build an open marketplace of services that agents can access programmatically without hitting paywalls or requiring human intervention. “We want to give agents the freedom to act,” he said, describing a system where software can seamlessly discover, buy and use digital services in real time.
Pollack said fully autonomous “zero-human” businesses are beginning to emerge, but in the short term the bigger change will come from humans augmenting themselves with AI.
“Top performers are now using agents to become even more top performers,” he said, explaining a workflow that leverages multiple parallel AI systems.
In the case of cryptocurrencies, adoption remains a broader challenge. Pollack argued that the solution is not to improve marketing, but to become invisible.
“It will be much easier to sell cryptocurrencies without having to tell people about them and just experience them,” he said.
Read more: Coinbase’s AI payment system joins Linux Foundation, gathers support from Google, Stripe, AWS, and more
