AI Agents Set to Revolutionize Financial Systems with Autonomous Payments
The concept of Agentic Finance (AiFi), proposed by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, envisions an economy powered by AI agents where software, not people, becomes the primary economic participant.
AiFi aims to create a financial system that can support autonomous payments, investments, and transactions between AI agents. This would require its own infrastructure, separate from traditional banking systems.
Armstrong argues that this is necessary because modern AI models are evolving beyond conventional chatbots into autonomous assistants capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks, including paying for resources without human involvement.
Coinbase is developing the open x402 protocol to enable software to automatically pay for access to data, APIs, computing resources, and other digital services. However, this concept has gained interest from major technology and financial firms beyond Coinbase, such as Google, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe.