Coinbase Launches Agentic Wallets for AI Agents to Trade Crypto Autonomously With Built-In Security

Coinbase Launches Wallet for AI Agents With Built-In Guardrails - Decrypt

Spend caps and restricted actions aim to limit prompt injection and misuse risks. The era of AI agents chatting is giving way to agents spending, and Coinbase aims to bridge autonomous software and digital commerce with security. On Wednesday, the company debuted Agentic Wallets, positioning the product not as another agent framework but as a payments infrastructure built directly into Coinbase's existing custody and compliance stack. "It's not an SDK, it's not a library -- it's a purpose-built wallet to work with an agent as quickly as possible," Erik Reppel, head of engineering for Coinbase Developer Platform, told Decrypt. "In itself, it's not an AI, but it's something you can give to an AI agent that it's going to be really good at using." Operating on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network, the Agentic Wallets is less a consumer app and more a technical toolkit built to work with AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, and the viral OpenClaw. According to Reppel, the launch targets a growing security risk in AI agents. "Today, most agents with wallets just have a private key sitting on disk somewhere, and you're already seeing those wallets get exploited, or people lose access when agents make mistakes," he said. Agentic wallets, in contrast, function as a skill within an AI environment. This allows bots to handle USDC, swap tokens, or pay for services using Coinbase's x402 payment protocol while keeping the vault keys separate from the agent's core logic. The release follows the rise of OpenClaw, an open-source framework for creating self-hosted agents that can handle tasks ranging from calendar management to running terminal commands. The autonomy has led to the development of agent-only projects. Developers have launched projects like SpaceMolt, an MMO game where AI factions mine asteroids; Moltbook, a social platform designed for AI agents to interact with one another; and services like RentAHuman, where bots hire people to perform real-world tasks and pay them using stablecoins. Giving a bot access to funds carries risk. Experts say allowing software to control money directly creates new security, governance, and compliance challenges that crypto infrastructure alone does not solve. In a recent report, Ellie Montgomery, a trend researcher at crypto portfolio management firm Hexn, outlined several agent risks, including prompt scams and intent hijacking; broad wallet allowances that extend control beyond a single action; and limited monitoring that makes activity hard to trace or reverse. To mitigate prompt injection attacks, where a malicious actor might trick an AI into emptying its wallet, Reppel said Coinbase isolates private keys from the AI. "The keys are stored within Coinbase's trusted execution environments," he said. A local session key and email OTP handle authentication, and while Reppel describes it as a self-custodial wallet that users can export off Coinbase, the agent never sees the private key. "Only you can access the wallet after having authenticated or having your agent authenticate," Reppel added. "The only thing that's shown to the wallet is the address." While he acknowledged that no sandbox protocol is perfect, Reppel maintains that the system is "several orders of magnitude safer than just having a private key on disk." For now, the tool is aimed at developers comfortable with a command line. "It's a little technical right now," Reppel said, adding that the product remains focused on Base for the time being, but future plans could extend to other blockchains. The move reflects a view that traditional banking systems are not built for autonomous software, while crypto payment rails are. "Your agent is going to need a way to pay for things, and your credit card is probably not the best way to do it," Reppel said. "Having a dedicated wallet with stablecoins makes it easier to keep it safe and lowers the friction of sending money."

Coinbase's New Wallets Let AI Agents Trade Crypto Autonomously

Features programmable guardrails, KYT screening and enclave key isolation Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange platform, announced the launch of Agentic Wallet on Wednesday. The move comes amid rising interest in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can execute tasks autonomously, including financial operations on blockchain networks. While AI agents have advanced in analysis and recommendations, executing transactions with real funds has remained limited by the need for human oversight and secure key management. The company says the new infrastructure addresses that gap by providing agents with dedicated wallets designed for autonomous use. Coinbase Introduces Agentic Wallets In a post on its Developer Platform, the crypto trading firm announced and detailed the new feature. Agentic Wallets are claimed to be the first wallet system built specifically for AI agents instead of human users. The company says the new technology is built on top of its existing AgentKit infrastructure, which focuses on embedding wallet features into agents. With the new tool, the primary focus is on supplying pre-configured wallets that any agent can adopt rapidly. The setup allows agents to hold assets such as USDC, send payments, trade tokens, and earn yields without direct access to private keys. It includes a library of built-in skills covering authentication, funding, asset transfers, trading, and yield generation. These components are available in a dedicated GitHub repository, allowing developers to extend agent behaviours without handling low-level transaction details. On security, Coinbase says the Agentic Wallets operate as non-custodial, with private keys stored in Trusted Execution Environments within Coinbase's infrastructure. Programmable controls enforce session spending limits, transaction size restrictions, and Know Your Transaction screening to identify potentially risky activities. Additionally, the full Coinbase Developer Platform security suite supports compliance and monitoring. The x402 protocol serves as the underlying payments standard, developed for machine-to-machine transactions, application programming interface (API) paywalls and programmatic access. It is said to have processed more than 50 million transactions to date. Additionally, it also offers gasless trading on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network for ongoing operations, eliminating fee barriers. Coming to potential use cases, the company says agents could monitor market conditions and adjust positions automatically. Machine economies might involve agents paying for computational resources or data via programmatic payments. Agentic commerce could enable independent monetisation of outputs or participation in creator networks. The infrastructure starts with strong support on Base, with multi-chain elements noted as possible expansions.

Coinbase unveils agentic wallets

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. The crypto exchange says that while AI agents have become ubiquitous, they "hit a wall when they need to actually do something that requires money". In response it has built wallet infrastructure that gives agents the power to spend, earn, and trade autonomously while maintaining enterprise-grade security and programmable guardrails. Coinbase says that enabling agents to hold and manage money opens up the possibility of autonomous DeFi, the machine economy, agentic commerce, and multi-chain agent operations. Says a blog: "We're moving from AI agents that advise to agents that act. From assistants that suggest to helpers that execute. From tools that require constant human oversight to autonomous systems that operate independently within trusted guardrails. "Agentic Wallets provide the fundamental infrastructure for this transition - giving agents the financial capabilities they need to operate autonomously while maintaining the security and trust that enterprises require."

Coinbase Debuts Crypto Wallet Infrastructure for AI Agents | PYMNTS.com

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."