Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is pushing back against calls for crypto to pivot to artificial intelligence, arguing AI agents will instead stoke demand for crypto-based financial services.
Armstrong took to X on Sunday to tout agentic finance (AiFi), highlighting Coinbase’s Base network, USDC and x402 as the infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments.
“AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto,” Armstrong wrote, because AI agents will need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails. “If anything, it makes crypto more important,” he added.
His comments come as crypto companies increasingly position blockchain networks as payment infrastructure for AI agents, with agentic payment activity on Base topping 100 million transactions in June.
How Coinbase’s AiFi stack came together
Armstrong’s AiFi vision centers on the idea that AI agents will become active participants in the digital economy, making payments and interacting with financial services without human intervention.
Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network designed to make onchain applications faster and cheaper to use. The network was built as general-purpose blockchain infrastructure rather than specifically for AI payments.
Two years later, Coinbase introduced x402, a payment protocol built around the HTTP “402 Payment Required” standard that enables automated stablecoin payments between software applications. The protocol allows AI agents and other autonomous systems to pay for digital resources such as APIs and data without traditional accounts or manual checkout flows.
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USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin launched by Circle and Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium in 2018, is one of the assets used for x402 payments, allowing software agents to make automated transactions.
Base, x402 and USDC together form the core of Coinbase’s current approach to building infrastructure for agentic payments.
Coinbase is slated to report second quarter earnings on Thursday. Analysts average is for revenue of $1.29 billion, with sales estimated to show a 13.8% decline over last year’s comparable period, Yahoo Finance data shows. Earnings per share are expected to be flat.
Base agentic activity tops 100 million transactions
Chainalysis reported in June that agentic payments on Base via x402 surpassed 100 million transactions within roughly nine months of activity.
The analytics firm said it tracked the activity by identifying x402-related payment flows onchain, with transactions worth at least $1 accounting for 95% of total value transferred.
Source: Chainalysis
Chainalysis also found that agentic payment wallets were typically newer, held more asset types and carried smaller balances than average Base users.
Cointelegraph asked Chainalysis for updated x402 activity figures and details on its tracking methodology, but the firm had not responded by publication time.
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