Coinbase Hands AI Agents the Car Keys to Your Crypto Wallet 🤖

Coinbase on Thursday launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that lets artificial intelligence systems trade cryptocurrencies, make payments, and manage portfolios on users' behalf, with shares of the exchange rising more than 3% following the announcement. The rollout arrives as technology, payments, and crypto companies race to build infrastructure for AI agents capable of conducting transactions in the real world. "We've been experimenting and building toward this for years with agentic wallets, payment rails, [and] trading tools, but all from a developer-facing perspective," Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, told Decrypt. "We believe agents are no longer a niche developer curiosity, but really a primary way people interact with the internet."

According to Coinbase, the product gives AI agents access to both financial information and transaction capabilities, allowing them to analyze portfolios and execute actions within limits set by the user. Coinbase for Agents is available as both a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for web-based AI assistants and a command-line interface for developers. Through the MCP integration, the product works with web-based AI platforms including ChatGPT and Claude, as well as other services that support the MCP standard, Murr said. The command-line version supports terminal-based environments, including Hermes Agent, Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenClaw.

Coinbase also introduced Coinbase Advisor, which it describes as an SEC- and CFTC-registered in-app financial advisor that provides AI-powered recommendations and guidance directly within the Coinbase app. Potential use cases include portfolio rebalancing, recurring investment strategies, cash management, and purchasing premium datasets to inform trading decisions. The company said agents can operate in isolated portfolios and will eventually support additional controls, including spending limits, trade-size restrictions, and permissions governing what services they can access.

"If it's on Coinbase, your agent can trade it with Coinbase for Agents. At launch, that means the full range of crypto spot markets and derivatives available on Coinbase today," Murr said. "As we expand the platform—equities, prediction markets, and beyond—those will become available to agents too. And once x402 support is added soon, payments will support Base and Solana." Agents can manage positions in assets including $BTC, $ETH, $XRP, and $SOL by acting on target allocations and limit orders triggered if prices drop by a set percentage.

Coinbase is the latest firm betting that AI agents will become active economic participants rather than recommendation engines. Earlier this month, crypto payments company MoonPay launched MoonAgents, a desktop application that allows Claude and OpenAI Codex to interact with crypto wallets, token swaps, prediction markets, and other blockchain services. On Wednesday, Mastercard introduced Agent Pay for Machines, a platform designed to enable AI agents to make payments on behalf of users.