Building For Every Side of the Agentic Economy

Last month, agentic traffic surpassed human traffic on our Base documentation pages for the first time. We believe agents are going to become the main way we access and navigate the internet across the board. This includes agents becoming the most active participants in the digital economy, operating on behalf of people 24/7, at a scale no human ever could.

But the internet’s previous financial infrastructure was built with one assumption: a human clicking the button. Businesses aren’t set up for selling to agents. Developers have to stitch together their own financial infrastructure from scratch just to give an agent a payment flow. And people need safe ways to give agents access to real-time financial tools without giving up control.

Until recently, the tools for the agentic economy existed in pieces - but no one had built the whole thing.

Coinbase is shipping three updates for every side of this emerging economy:

• Businesses accepting payments from agents
• People putting agents to work
• Developers building products and services for agents

Here’s what’s new ↓

For Businesses: Agentic Payments Acceptance via Coinbase Business

Beginning this week, Coinbase Business users will be able to accept USDC payments from AI agents.

Powered by Coinbase Payments infrastructure, the experience includes native support for x402, an open payment standard designed for internet-native, pay-per-use transactions. That means businesses can accept agent-driven payments without building a separate payment flow from scratch.

With Coinbase Business, businesses can:

• Accept USDC payments from agents
• Manage, reconcile, and cash out agent payments. All in one account.
• Earn 3.35% in rewards on idle USDC balance¹
• Receive payments without chargeback risk²

As more activity moves from human-operated browsers to autonomous software, businesses need a way to serve both.

Coinbase Business is being built for that future.

For People: Coinbase for Agents, New Trading Views

Last month we introduced Coinbase for Agents, our MCP/CLI that lets people connect AI agents to Coinbase. Now, we’re adding real-time market views and conditional actions, all within guardrails set by the user.

New commands include:

• orders list --watch: Streams your agent’s open and active orders in real time, showing status, price, and size so you can supervise every move.
• products book [BTC-USD]: For any asset, reveals current bids and asks, depth, and liquidity so your agent can gauge market depth before trading.
• products ticker [ETH-USD] --watch: For any asset, follow real-time price and volume updates for ETH-USD to spot trends at a glance.
• --until: Sets a price or condition that, when met, triggers a pre-set action, like a buy, sell or cancel. Lets you automate entry points while keeping control over when actions execute.

These put agentic trading at your fingertips, with your agent getting real-time market data and executing on conditions you define.

Tell it what you want in plain English - “Dump everything if BTC drops below $50k,” “Cancel my open order if it hasn't filled in an hour” - and it watches the market and executes for you. The same WebSocket data that powers institutional desks is now accessible through natural language.

Coinbase for Agents lets anyone put their AI to work financially - closing the gap between research and action, and all within guardrails you control.

For Developers: Add agent payments in three lines of code with CDP x402 SDK

Thanks to the new x402 SDK from Coinbase Developer Platform, builders can now add x402 payment acceptance to any API, MCP server, or web service in 3 lines of code.

1import express from "express";
2import { createX402Server } from "@coinbase/cdp-sdk/x402";
3import { paymentMiddlewareFromHTTPServer } from "@x402/express";
4
5const app = express();

The CDP x402 SDK is Coinbase's opinionated version of the open-source x402 standard, pre-wired with infrastructure and recommended extensions.

Before this, sellers had to manually configure their middleware, select infra providers, and bolt on extensions themselves. This SDK removes all of that: it’s production-ready right out of the box.

This is great for developers who want to make their product or service payable by AI agents, without having to become an x402 expert first.

If you’re building an agent, it’s also never been easier to get it set up with a wallet and spend controls using the CDP SDK’s managed wallet and policy engine.

A financial system for humans and agents

AI agents are already researching, trading, paying and operating across the internet. But it’s still early.

They’ll also need infrastructure designed for how they work. Coinbase is building the full stack for all of it: the rails, the accounts, the tools.

This week is three more steps toward a financial system that works for humans and agents alike.

Legal stuff:

¹Coinbase does not intend for the reward-bearing products described herein to constitute a securities offering, and purchasing these products is not the same as investing in a securities offering.

As a Coinbase Business customer, you are automatically opted in to USDC rewards when holding USDC. If you’d like to opt out or learn more about rewards, you can click here. The USDC Rewards rates can vary depending on your region and ongoing experimentation. Please check the list of eligible regions here. Customers will be able to see the latest applicable rates directly within their accounts.

²Coinbase is not a party to transactions between you and your customers and is not responsible for any goods and/or services you provide to your customers.