Coinbase Debuts Agentic Wallets to Automate On-Chain Trading
Coinbase has launched Agentic Wallets, a new crypto wallet infrastructure designed for artificial intelligence agents to autonomously transact on-chain. Announced on Wednesday, the feature allows users to pre-set permissions and controls, enabling AI programs to manage liquidity positions, execute trades, and rebalance portfolios on the Ethereum layer-2 network Base without needing real-time human approval. This builds on the company's AgentKit framework, introduced in November 2024, which first enabled developers to embed wallets into AI agents.
According to Coinbase programmers Erik Reppel and Josh Nickerson, the initiative aims to evolve AI from a tool that merely advises to one that actively executes financial strategies on a user's behalf. The new generation of agents can monitor decentralized finance (DeFi) yields across protocols and automatically rebalance assets to capture better opportunities, even at 3 a.m., creating a system for persistent, automated on-chain activity.
x402 Protocol Underpins Broader Push Into AI Transactions
The new wallets operate via Coinbase's x402, a purpose-built payments protocol for autonomous AI use cases that has already processed 50 million transactions. This protocol facilitates a self-sustaining machine economy where agents can autonomously pay for API keys, compute power, and data access. The significant transaction volume demonstrates early traction for machine-to-machine payments, a core component of the agentic AI thesis.
This development is part of a wider industry trend toward integrating AI with crypto payments. On the same day, Lightning Labs released a toolset for AI agents to transact on the Bitcoin Lightning Network using its L402 protocol. This follows the recent launch of ai.com by Crypto.com's CEO for creating personal AI agents and predictions from industry leaders like Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, who expects billions of AI agents to use stablecoins for daily payments within three to five years.
