Coinbase Hands AI Agents the Keys to the Crypto Trading Desk 🤖

Coinbase on Thursday launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that lets artificial intelligence systems trade cryptocurrencies, make payments, and manage portfolios on behalf of users. The announcement sent shares of Coinbase (COIN) up more than 3%. Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, said the product reflects years of internal work on agentic wallets, payment rails, and trading tools. "We believe agents are no longer a niche developer curiosity, but really a primary way people interact with the internet," Murr told Decrypt. "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."

The product is available as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for web-based AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Claude, and as a command-line interface supporting Hermes Agent, Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenClaw. Coinbase said agents can analyze portfolios and execute transactions within limits set by the user, operating in isolated portfolios with planned controls such as spending limits, trade-size restrictions, and service-specific permissions. Use cases include portfolio rebalancing across assets such as $BTC, $ETH, $XRP, and $SOL, recurring investment strategies, cash management, and purchasing premium datasets. Coinbase added that once x402 support is added soon, payments will support Base and Solana.

Alongside the trading tool, Coinbase introduced Coinbase Advisor, which the company described as an SEC- and CFTC-registered in-app financial adviser that delivers AI-powered recommendations and guidance directly inside the Coinbase app. The exchange said future expansions could extend agent capabilities to equities, prediction markets, and additional services.

The launch comes as financial and technology firms race to build infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Earlier this month, crypto payments firm MoonPay launched MoonAgents, a desktop application that lets Claude and OpenAI Codex interact with crypto wallets, token swaps, prediction markets, and other blockchain services. On Wednesday, Mastercard introduced Agent Pay for Machines, a platform designed for agent-driven payments, while stablecoin issuer Circle last month released tools that let AI agents use wallets, discover services, and make programmable payments with its token. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has predicted that billions of AI agents will use stablecoins within five years.

Coinbase framed the product as a way for users to manage crypto "without the constant manual oversight," giving an example in which an agent could be prompted to pull 30 days of hourly ETH price data, set a recurring $20 market buy at the historically lowest trading hour, and schedule the purchase daily for two weeks. The rollout arrives alongside research from Pantera Capital, Stanford University, Ava Labs, and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, which studied more than 925,000 token holders and reported that agent treasuries made gains of $30 million on paper while their token holders collectively lost $191.7 million, with the study noting that "a substantial share" of projects studied were "basic API integrations."