Coinbase CEO Touts Agentic Finance as Base Hits 100M AI Payments

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is promoting agentic finance (AiFi), which he believes will boost demand for crypto-based financial services. He argues that AI agents will need programmable money, not traditional banking rails.

Armstrong highlighted Coinbase's Base network, USDC stablecoin, and x402 payment protocol as the infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments on agentic finance. He emphasized that 'AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto' and instead makes it more important.

The concept of AiFi centers around AI agents becoming active participants in the digital economy, making payments and interacting with financial services without human intervention. Base, launched by Coinbase in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network, has seen over 100 million agentic payment transactions via x402 in June, according to Chainalysis.

USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in 2018, is used for x402 payments, enabling software agents to make automated transactions. Coinbase's approach to building infrastructure for agentic payments involves integrating Base, x402, and USDC.