Coinbase's Agentic Finance Push: Over 100M AI Payments on Base

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is championing agentic finance as AI agents increasingly interact with financial services.

Armstrong took to X on Sunday to tout agentic finance, highlighting Coinbase's Base network and USDC as key infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments.

Base, an Ethereum layer-2 network launched by Coinbase in 2023, has seen over 100 million transactions via the x402 payment protocol, which allows AI agents and software applications to make automated stablecoin payments without traditional banking rails.

x402 is built around the HTTP '402 Payment Required' standard and enables automated USDC payments between software applications, allowing AI agents to pay for digital resources like APIs and data without human intervention.