Coinbase's Armstrong Touts Agentic Finance as Crypto and AI Intersection

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is pushing back against a common narrative that AI and crypto are competing technologies. In a recent post, he argued that crypto and AI are interconnected, with crypto being the infrastructure that underpins the next big thing.

Armstrong likened crypto to electricity or the internet, saying it's a general-purpose technology that makes other things possible. He claimed that AI agents will eventually transact far more per day than all humans combined, but the legacy financial system wasn't designed for software, which is where stablecoins come in.

Coinbase has been working on infrastructure to support agentic payments, including the x402 payment protocol and USDC stablecoin. The company claims that this technology is being used by a majority of agentic payments as of mid-2026, with Google, Visa, Mastercard, and others backing it.

However, some experts point out that while the narrative around AI and crypto is exciting, the actual volume of transactions onchain is still relatively small. One report found that x402 processed only about $28,000 in daily volume, much of which was from testing or 'gamed' transactions rather than real commerce.