Coinbase Lets Businesses Accept USDC Payments from AI Agents

Coinbase is expanding its services to accommodate AI agents as customers, allowing businesses to accept USDC payments directly from them. This move is part of a three-product push, which includes enabling reusable payment links and automatic buyer data collection for reconciliation.

The feature, built on the x402 payment standard, enables instant and irreversible USDC transactions between merchants using Coinbase Business and AI agents. Sid Coelho-Prabhu, who leads Coinbase Business, described this as 'recreating a familiar transaction for a new customer type.'

Coinbase is also launching its CDP x402 SDK, which allows developers to easily integrate agent payment acceptance into their APIs or web services with just three lines of code. This kit pre-configures the open-source x402 standard and includes payment plumbing and suggested extensions.

The company is counting on early traffic to gauge whether this move is timely, citing that agent visits have surpassed human visits to its developer documentation pages for the first time last month.