Coinbase for Agents lets AI assistants trade crypto and move money autonomously

Coinbase debuts AI agent that can trade and pay for premium research

As AI agent traffic surpasses human traffic on the internet, companies working in commerce and finance are building tools that allow agents to take action on behalf of users at a rapid pace. Days after trading platform Robinhood introduced agents that can trade for users, Coinbase launched its own agents that can execute trades and pay for premium research. The company said Thursday that users can integrate the agent with their main account and start trading. If users don't want to give the agent access to their main account, they can choose to have it operate in a separate sandbox. Coinbase noted that the agent can use tools like Coinbase Advanced, the company's platform for professional traders that includes extra features like TradingView charts, to analyze and execute trades. Users can ask the agent to rebalance their portfolio, ask it to follow an investment thesis and trade on their behalf, or provide advice on a one-time crypto trade. At the moment, the agent can trade in crypto spot markets and derivatives, with support for equities and prediction markets planned for the future. Coinbase added that it will soon add support for custom limits such as maximum trade size, which services the agent can interact with, and how much it can spend. Coinbase is taking advantage of the open x402 payment protocol it launched in collaboration with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near last year. Using this standard, the agent can pay for premium research data APIs, and on-demand compute for trading insights without requiring any login or subscription. This website lists services that the agent can access through the x402 protocol. The trading platform has been actively investing in AI tools for the last few years. It launched AgentKit, which allows developers to integrate automated wallets into their apps in 2024. Last December, it added an AI-powered assistant to the app that provides trading tips and financial advice. The company said that the latest agent launch can also work in ChatGPT or Claude through its MCP server. "Coinbase for Agents is informed by insights gleaned from years of building the agentic economy, and the primary goal is to create agents that can transact. And unlike pure trading platforms, we're the only one that combines exchange access with a native payments protocol. We're aiming to build a fundamentally different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents," Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Product, told TechCrunch via email. AI companies are exploring agentic payments at a rapid pace through new partnerships. Last month, Visa invested in Replit to power agentic payments for developers. The payment network company made a deal with OpenAI this week to explore similar products. The pace of development in the sector has made global financial regulators take notice. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) said that there should be strong safeguards in place to mitigate AI risks.

Coinbase launches tool to let AI agents manage trading and payments

Coinbase on Thursday launched a new tool that gives AI agents the ability to trade and transact directly on users' behalf, representing a broader bet that AI agents will become a primary interface for people's financial activity. Coinbase for Agents will initially allow agents like ChatGPT or Claude to execute crypto trades using natural language instructions. For example, customers can prompt their agent to rebalance portfolios, identify trading opportunities, execute strategies and manage positions over time. It will eventually expand these capabilities to stocks and predictions. Additionally, using Coinbase's machine-to-machine payments protocol, called x402, agents can pay directly for digital services like paywalled research, data APIs and on-demand compute without a human in the loop -- and execute trades based on those insights. The company sees this stage of agentic payments, which lets customers bypass the need to manage traditional logins or subscriptions, as a precursor to agentic shopping, where agents browse, find the best deals, select and make purchases on users' behalf. "The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet." The launch comes right in the middle of an AI boom where agentic systems are one of the hottest investing themes. At the same time, the crypto sector is still in a relatively subdued, post-cycle slump - making the launch both a hype-aligned bet on AI and a contrarian push into a softer trading environment. Coinbase earns trading fees on agent-executed trades, and for payments it captures fees and spreads on USDC movement, which serves as the settlement currency for agentic transactions. It also benefits from increased transaction volume on Base, its in-house Layer 2 blockchain that underpins these transactions. The x402 protocol was created in May 2025 and has seen more than 100 million transactions since its debut, Murr said. There are about 157,000 agents acting as buyers using the protocol in the past 30 days, according to x402scan.com. "We saw immediate demand and interest in the ability for agents to pay for things autonomously and that was a huge waking up moment for us [on] the ability of agents to become these new primary financial actors across the internet," he said.

Coinbase for Agents lets AI assistants trade crypto and move money

Coinbase for Agents lets AI assistants trade crypto and move money Coinbase Global Inc. today launched Coinbase for Agents, a standalone tool that lets artificial intelligence agents trade cryptocurrency, pay for services and operate with financial autonomy directly from assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT. The product is not a feature inside the Coinbase app but a separate account built for agents. Users connect an existing Coinbase account, set spending limits and the agent can begin transacting on their behalf. Coinbase is pitching it as potentially the only account an agent will ever need. Coinbase for Agents builds on work the company started in 2024 with AgentKit, which gave developers the ability to put wallets in the hands of agents. It later added Coinbase Advisor, an AI agent inside the Coinbase app offering recommendations and execution. The new tool extends that approach to third-party agents people already use. At launch, an agent can trade crypto spot markets and derivatives, operating either from an isolated portfolio or from the user's main account balance. Coinbase said it will add equities, prediction markets and other asset classes available on its platform over time. The trading capability draws on Coinbase Advanced, the company's professional-grade service, accessible through natural language rather than manual execution. Users define how much autonomy to grant. An agent can be asked for a onetime recommendation, set to make a trade a day for a week, or handed a thesis and left to run a strategy on its own. The payments side leans on x402, an open standard for machine-to-machine payments that Coinbase originated. With native x402 support, an agent will be able to pay for individual services such as paywalled research, data application programming interfaces and on-demand compute without logins or subscriptions. In one workflow, an agent could pay a few cents for data normally behind a paywall, synthesize it and execute a trade based on the result. Coinbase said stablecoins are its preferred payment rail for the use case because they are programmable, global and operate continuously, though x402 is built to support other payment methods. The company also said the account is positioned for agentic shopping and checkout flows as those come online. On the security side, Coinbase said granting an agent financial autonomy does not require handing over full account access. An agent can run inside an isolated sandbox with no visibility into a user's other holdings or draw on the main account, touching only what the user assigns. The company said it will soon let users set exact rules covering maximum trade size, what an agent can interact with and how much it can spend. The launch comes as agentic commerce gains momentum. Coinbase cited projections that agents moving money on users' behalf could account for roughly 20% of the e-commerce market by 2030. More than half of internet traffic is already nonhuman, the company said. Coinbase for Agents is live today, with support documentation for connecting an agent available at launch.

Coinbase Tool Lets AI Agents Trade Crypto, Make Payments

Coinbase for Agents will let users of the crypto exchange manage their holdings "without the constant manual oversight" and can autonomously perform a range of tasks. Crypto exchange Coinbase has launched a tool that allows artificial intelligence agents to make payments and trade crypto on behalf of users, as crypto companies look to ride a wave of interest in AI. Coinbase said Thursday that it is launching Coinbase for Agents, which will allow AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to connect with a user's exchange account and be prompted to make trades or execute strategies. AI agents can also make payments using Coinbase's AI payments protocol x402, allowing the bots to pay for data services to gather information for carrying out trading strategies without human intervention. Crypto companies have been positioning the technology as a means to support the high-frequency microtransactions that agents typically carry out. AI agents have grown in popularity with the release of better models, with more traders trusting them to autonomously execute trading strategies. Coinbase said the tool is available via both a model context protocol (MCP), allowing AI models to connect with a user account, and a command-line interface for developers. Source: Coinbase The company said it also introduced Coinbase Advisor, an AI agent integrated into its app that it says is a US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission-registered financial adviser that can give guidance on trades. Coinbase said the tool could help users manage their crypto "without the constant manual oversight" and can undertake tasks like allocating funds to reward programs or making recurring buys. "Imagine you want to dollar-cost average into ETH at the optimal time of day. Just tell your agent your target and timeframe. It can pull 30 days of hourly price data to identify when ETH historically trades lowest, set a recurring $20 market buy at that time, and schedule it to run daily for the next two weeks," the company explained. While many companies are pitching for investors to start using AI, a study published last month found that users of AI agents are losing money, and the agents themselves may not really be working alone. Researchers at Pantera Capital, Stanford University, Ava Labs and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts studied over 925,000 token holders and found that agent treasuries made gains of $30 million on paper, while their token holders collectively lost $191.7 million. It also found that many of the projects it studied "do not yet provide clear evidence of autonomous trade execution" with a "substantial share" of projects being "basic API integrations." Coinbase is the latest to bet that AI agents will interact with and transact across multiple services. Stablecoin issuer Circle last month launched tools letting AI agents use wallets, discover services and make programmable payments with its token. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has predicted that billions of AI agents will use stablecoins within five years. Earlier this month, the stablecoin and wallet infrastructure provider Crossmint launched a service that enabled AI agents to make payments using eligible Visa credit and debit cards. Crypto investment firm Keyrock said in a report in May that AI agents had quickly created a "developed ecosystem," and had settled $73 million across 176 million transactions between May 2025 and April 2026.

Coinbase Lets User Connects AI Agents to Trading Accounts | PYMNTS.com

The new Coinbase for Agents facilitates these connections and enables agents to gain full context about the user's financial life and act on the user's behalf, the company said in a Thursday (June 11) blog post. Coinbase has enabled crypto spot and derivatives trading, effective Thursday, and plans to add trading stock and index funds, prediction markets and commodities, making everything available on Coinbase available to agents, according to the post. The company suggested in the release that agents can be used to do things such as rebalance a portfolio over a period of months by taking advantage of short-term market movements; monitor a cash position around the clock and execute moves to ensure idle funds are always working; and, when Coinbase for Agents is x402-enabled, pay for premium data and services. "The way people interact with the internet is changing," Coinbase said in the post. "People are increasingly moving through the world via agents rather than apps -- and businesses are rapidly rebuilding their products to be agent-first in turn. As that ecosystem grows, Coinbase for Agents is positioned to be your trading and spending account at the center of it." PYMNTS reported in May that during an earnings call, Coinbase leadership told investors that they believe AI agents will become major economic participants, autonomously executing payments, transactions and commerce activity online. "We're leading on the next frontier with over 90% of on-chain agentic stablecoin transaction volume happening on Base," Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said during the call. "We believe there will soon be billions of agents transacting and they need rails that can keep up, and Coinbase is at the center of the agent economy." Coinbase announced in December that it added an AI-powered advisor for financial management called Coinbase Advisor to the Coinbase app. The company said Coinbase Advisor can provide personalized answers and recommendation in response to questions and commands such as "What's the latest market news and how does it impact me?" or "Build me a portfolio."

Coinbase Launches AI Tools for Trading and Payments

Read the Coinbase blog post here. Coinbase has launched a service that allows AI agents to access user accounts to trade, make payments, and run workflows within user-defined limits. This service is now available through MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration and a CLI (Command-Line Interface). How does it work? Users can link agents to an isolated portfolio, which restricts access to other holdings, or to their main account. Coinbase plans to introduce configurable rules covering maximum trade size, permitted assets, and spending caps. All agent payments will be subject to the same transaction monitoring and KYT (Know Your Transaction) checks as the rest of the platform. Spot and derivatives trading for crypto is now available, with future expansion planned for stocks, index funds, prediction markets, and commodities. Key use cases include automated portfolio rebalancing, efficient deployment of idle cash, and scheduling recurring trades based on historical price trends. The system will also integrate with x402, an agentic payments protocol, enabling agents to pay for data and services. The MCP option supports web-based agent platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude Web, requiring only a single login and no API keys. In contrast, a CLI with a "skill" is designed for terminal-based environments such as Claude Code or Codex, offering lower token overhead and greater customization. A remote MCP that allows users to sign in with Coinbase without API keys is also planned. Part of a broader push: This expands on Coinbase's previous AI initiatives. In 2024, the company launched AgentKit, a toolkit that enables developers to integrate autonomous wallets into their apps, allowing bots to manage and transfer crypto without manual input. In December, Coinbase advanced these efforts by adding an AI assistant to its main app, providing users with trading tips and basic financial guidance tailored to their portfolios and market conditions. Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's Head of AI Product, identifies this as the key distinction from competitors such as Robinhood. According to Murr, while most platforms allow agents to trade, Coinbase enables both trading and payments, positioning the company as infrastructure for the "agentic economy" rather than simply another brokerage with an added bot. Why this matters? Coinbase's launch comes as financial and payments companies compete to build infrastructure for autonomous agents. Last month, Visa invested in Replit to support agentic payments for developers, and this week formed a separate partnership with OpenAI to explore similar products. These moves indicate that traditional card networks view agent-initiated transactions as a significant new revenue stream, not just a niche experiment. Mastercard and other payment processors are also developing agentic-commerce initiatives, suggesting that the payments industry is restructuring itself to accommodate AI systems that can initiate purchases and trades at scale.