AI Agents Set to Dominate Crypto Growth: Coinbase Predicts

Coinbase is predicting that the next wave of growth in cryptocurrency will come from artificial intelligence agents transacting with each other and making their own economy.

According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, there have been over 100 million agent payments on Coinbase's Base blockchain through the first quarter of 2026. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong claims that these agents will eventually out-transact all humans combined.

The chains with the most real agent activity today are Ethereum and Solana, aside from Base. Agentic payments, which involve money transfers initiated and confirmed by AI agents without human intervention, are just getting started.

Coinbase is incentivized to promote the idea that agentic payments and commerce are the future of cryptocurrency, as it helped launch the x402 standard, a simple and machine-readable paywall for online materials. The ERC-8004 standard, co-authored by contributors from the Ethereum Foundation and Coinbase among others, will also help the agentic economy grow.