AI agents are becoming active participants in the economy.
They research, make decisions, and take action on behalf of people and businesses. But to participate fully, they eventually need to do the same basic things people do: pay, get paid, hold value, and move money.
Last year, we started calling the financial layer emerging around them Agentic Finance, or AiFi.
We think of AiFi in two ways: agentic trading and agentic commerce. Agents can monitor markets, manage workflows, compare products, and purchase information continuously.
But when it’s time to transact, they run into a financial system designed exclusively for humans. We’re building tools so that when agents need money, they choose Coinbase.
Finance was built for people who sleep
The traditional financial system assumes there’s a person behind every transaction.
Most payment methods expect legal names and billing addresses. Banks keep business hours.
This infrastructure often creates friction for people. But for autonomous agents, it can mean a dead end - when an agent encounters infrastructure requiring human intervention, it simply stops.
Agents need financial infrastructure that is always on, programmable, global and capable of handling fast, cheap payments.
Crypto and stablecoins provide exactly that. They allow value to move around the clock, between participants that may not be people at all.
This does not mean removing human control. People and businesses set the rules, permissions, limits and guardrails. Software acts within them.
That is the foundation of AiFi.
What AiFi looks like in practice
Consider someone who wants to maintain a particular portfolio allocation.
They connect Coinbase for Agents to their favourite AI harness, describe the objective, and define the appropriate permissions and guardrails. The agent monitors the account and can act when the user-defined conditions are met.
Or a marketing team running a campaign.
During some copy testing, the team’s agent determines that it needs a new dataset. The agent finds a research provider, pays for access through x402 receives the data, and continues working, suggesting copy changes to align with its new findings.
Agentic finance changes the economics. It allows software to pay for one request, one service, or one unit of work at a time to move and trade money in entirely new ways. And this is already happening - quietly, automatically, and at a scale most people have not yet noticed.
You can already press the button today
The infrastructure for agentic finance (AiFi) already exists on Coinbase, and agents are already using it to move real money.
It consists of tools for agentic trading (Coinbase Advisor and Coinbase for Agents) and agentic commerce (x402 and Coinbase for Business).
Using your Coinbase account, start simple in-app with Coinbase Advisor, our SEC registered AI powered investment advisor or build a strategy with your agent using our MCP. You can dabble in paying for top-end research and more with the leading open payments protocol started at Coinbase. And for businesses, we’ve enabled agentic customers without any complicated software.
(And of course, we believe this all runs best using USDC on @Base).
Start with in-app financial advice from an agent
Coinbase Advisor is an SEC-registered investment adviser built into the app for Coinbase One users. It gives users access to portfolio analysis and guidance through a chat interface, helping to understand and oversee financial decisions.
According to our research, 70% of crypto investors say they would allow AI to help manage a portfolio if it came with the right guardrails and a trusted brand.
The future of agentic finance is not an agent doing just anything with someone’s money. It starts with setting the objective, the boundaries, and the permissions - and software handling the continuous work inside them.
https://x.com/coinbase/status/2066969129110630667
Level up by setting up your own in-agent trading strategy
Coinbase for Agents connects tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor to a Coinbase account via MCP.
A user can give an agent an instruction, define the conditions under which it can act, and establish guardrails around that activity. The agent can then monitor for those conditions and execute when they are met. Users can also create a separate sandboxed account just for the agent, giving it access to only that account rather than their whole portfolio.
The important change is not simply that AI can provide information. It is that, within clearly defined permissions, AI can take action.
https://x.com/coinbase/status/2066970874016645585
When an agent can pay, the real step-change starts
Agents also need a way to pay other agents, applications, and services as they work.
x402 is an open payment standard for machine-to-machine commerce started at Coinbase, now under its own foundation. It allows an agent to find a paid resource, make a payment, and continue its task without stopping to create an account, enter card details, or begin a subscription.
That payment might be a few cents for an API call, a dataset, a piece of research, or a unit of compute. The payment becomes part of the internet request itself. No need for subscriptions when an agent can just pay for exactly what it needs.
To date, x402 has processed more than 205 million transactions and $53 million in volume across 200k sellers, with Coinbase facilitating 67% of that activity.
This is what internet-native commerce looks like: software paying software, in real time, for exactly what it needs.
https://x.com/coinbase/status/2066978987268542679
Businesses can get in on the fun too
Every payment needs someone - or something - on the other side.
Coinbase Business lets businesses accept USDC from agents natively. Before service and content providers had to choose between blocking bots out entirely or giving away goods for free.
@CoinbaseBiz gives merchants a way to sell to software without relying on card credentials, manual invoicing, or payment processes that assume the customer is human. There are no chargebacks, and eligible businesses can earn a variable 3.35% reward on idle USDC balances.
USDC currently represents 99% of onchain agentic commerce, while x402 accounts for 97% of agentic protocol usage. This activity runs on @Base, which was built for low-cost, always-on, programmatic transactions at scale.
https://x.com/CoinbaseBiz/status/2087225675052925201
Together, all these products form the beginnings of a financial system designed for both humans and machines.
A new class of economic participant
The internet first connected people to information, then to one another, and eventually to commerce.
AI agents represent the next shift: software that can not only retrieve information, but make decisions, coordinate resources, and transact on behalf of people and businesses.
Intelligence alone is not enough. To participate in the economy, agents need financial infrastructure that is global, programmable, always available, and capable of processing large numbers of small transactions - all within human-defined permissions and guardrails.
The traditional financial system was not built for that world. But crypto was, and now AI agents are putting it to work.
This is AiFi. And when agents need money, they choose Coinbase.
Legal Stuff:
Product availability varies by jurisdiction and is subject to eligibility. Coinbase Advisor is offered by Coinbase Advisors LLC, a registered investment adviser and commodity trading advisor. Coinbase Advisor is an automated guidance and education tool that uses AI and Coinbase data. Outputs may be inaccurate or incomplete and should not be your only source of information. Trading and investment strategies involve risk, including possible loss of capital.
