Coinbase CEO: AI Won't Eat Crypto — It'll Need Crypto's Autobahn 🤖

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong pushed back against calls for the crypto industry to chase artificial intelligence, arguing instead that AI agents will become the primary drivers of demand for blockchain-based financial services. Armstrong used a Sunday post on X to promote what he termed "agentic finance," or AiFi, naming Coinbase's Base network, the USDC stablecoin and the company's x402 payment protocol as the infrastructure layer for autonomous machine-to-machine payments. "AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto," Armstrong wrote. "If anything, it makes crypto more important," he added, contending that AI agents will require programmable money rather than traditional banking rails.

Armstrong's AiFi vision rests on the premise that AI agents will operate as active participants in the digital economy, executing payments and interacting with financial services without human oversight. Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network built to lower the cost and latency of onchain applications. In 2025 the firm introduced x402, a payment protocol built around the HTTP "402 Payment Required" status code that enables automated stablecoin transfers between software clients, allowing AI agents and other autonomous systems to settle charges for APIs, data and other digital resources without traditional accounts or manual checkout flows. USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin originally launched by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium in 2018, is one of the assets used for x402 settlement, and together with Base forms the core of Coinbase's current agentic-payments stack.

On-chain analytics firm Chainalysis reported in June that agentic payments on Base via x402 exceeded 100 million transactions within roughly nine months of activity. The firm said it tracked x402-related payment flows onchain, with transactions worth at least $1 representing 95% of total value transferred. Chainalysis also found that agentic payment wallets tended to be newer, held a wider range of asset types and carried smaller balances than the average Base user. Cointelegraph said it had requested updated x402 activity figures and methodology details from Chainalysis, but the firm had not responded by publication time.

Coinbase is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on Thursday. Analysts' average estimate is for revenue of $1.29 billion, which would represent a 13.8% decline from the year-ago comparable period, according to Yahoo Finance data, with earnings per share expected to be flat year over year.