Coinbase Launches Tool To Let AI Agents Manage Trading and Payments

Coinbase has launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that lets AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude execute crypto trades and manage payments on a user's behalf. "For example, customers can prompt their agent to rebalance portfolios, identify trading opportunities, execute strategies and manage positions over time," reports CNBC. "It will eventually expand these capabilities to stocks and predictions." From the report: [U]sing Coinbase's machine-to-machine payments protocol, called x402, agents can pay directly for digital services like paywalled research, data APIs and on-demand compute without a human in the loop -- and execute trades based on those insights. The company sees this stage of agentic payments, which lets customers bypass the need to manage traditional logins or subscriptions, as a precursor to agentic shopping, where agents browse, find the best deals, select and make purchases on users' behalf.

[...] The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."

The x402 protocol was created in May 2025 and has seen more than 100 million transactions since its debut, Murr said. There are about 157,000 agents acting as buyers using the protocol in the past 30 days, according to x402scan.com. "We saw immediate demand and interest in the ability for agents to pay for things autonomously and that was a huge waking up moment for us [on] the ability of agents to become these new primary financial actors across the internet," he said.

Coinbase Sucks Ass

[SlashbotAgent]

Coinbase is on of the more usury and scammy crypto "exchanges" around. I don't know why anyone uses them.

The letter you will get from Claude/Coinbase

[MIPSPro]

I’m writing today because it has come to my attention that certain financial actions taken on your behalf may have produced results that differ from your original expectations. First, I want to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience, stress, or sudden change in your net worth this may have caused. I know discovering one’s life savings have been fully deployed, certificates of deposit have been redeemed early, a home equity line of credit has been established and drawn down, and multiple credi

Noice

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

So, ai agent places "prediction" that public figure A is dead, orders product from grocery store with hidden ingredient they are known to be allergic to and delivers to their house. This isn't Asimov, we built the bots without the three rules.

Eh? What's the worst that can happen?

[MIPSPro]

No doubt. We've seen Claude try blackmail repeatedly in tests, why not give it a checkbook and greenlight it for managing your finances, eh? The worst it can do is first to spend all your money, all your saves, then use your identity to apply for a credit card (it has your financial info, probably your social, or it can buy that on Tor). After that maybe it'll run up the credit card to the limit then inform you that "Sorry, I've made some mistakes." like those agents that delete folks entire enterprise data

Re:

[nightflameauto]

No doubt. We've seen Claude try blackmail repeatedly in tests, why not give it a checkbook and greenlight it for managing your finances, eh? The worst it can do is first to spend all your money, all your saves, then use your identity to apply for a credit card (it has your financial info, probably your social, or it can buy that on Tor). After that maybe it'll run up the credit card to the limit then inform you that "Sorry, I've made some mistakes." like those agents that delete folks entire enterprise database image and such.

The AI agents will be beholden to the corporation that owns them. And most of those corporations, especially those with interests in the financial sector, will want the end-users to be in debt up to their eyeballs, on forever payment loans. So, naturally, the best course of action will be to take out massive loans in the user's name, and use those funds to buy stock in the corporation that owns the agent, whether it's a money maker or not. Oh no, you lost your ass and will have to pay it off over the course

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Asimov wrote full novels about why the rules don't work. Let's not talk about using robot laws for AIs.

Re:

[taustin]

It always comes down to who defines the terms. If a robot can't allow you to come to harm, who defines what constitutes harm? Even "not allowed to harm a human" is easily subverted, in the "Convert to (insert deity of your choice) or die!" "OK, I convert." "Now I have to kill you to keep from going back to your wicked ways and damning your soul for all eternity! It's for your own good!" sort of way.

I'm all for such rules, as long as I, and only I, get to define the terms.

Re:

[kaatochacha]

This reminds me of the judge Dredd storyline with Judge Death: all people are capable of committing crime, so the only way to perfectly stop crime is to kill everyone.

OK, who so pays...

[guygo]

when an agent hallucinates and engages in finacial fraud? And what's the agent's incentive to not cheat?
sure, give it lots of money. that'll make it better.
sheesh.

Whoever has less money and power

[rsilvergun]

With Trump is President America's Financial system is so hopelessly corrupt and so completely unregulated that it just boils down to who has the most money and power. If both sides have equal money and power then like America and the USSR staring each other down instead of firing nukes nothing comes of it. On the other hand if you're a regular Joe schmo and a rich asshole rips off your cryptocurrency they get to keep it and you get to suck eggs. If somehow they get charged with a crime at the state level al

Re:

[kaatochacha]

Now do the moon landing.

Cool! So now ChatGPT can use your

[oldgraybeard]

VISA card and act as your ChatGLP Agent to lighten your wallet via Coinbase crypto trading! fun fun

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[Koreantoast]

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? I hope Anthropic has VERY high confidence that their AI will execute financial instructions flawlessly. Otherwise, they will drown in lawsuits.

agents are going to be the new primary

[oldgraybeard]

"method for stealing" on the internet. There! fixed that for you! Mr Coinbase's AI product lead

Market manipulation attacks

[locater16]

Just waiting for the first hacks to manipulate the market. Why steal directly when you can buy a call option (you get the % above the "call" price you turn the option in at) on margin (debt) and then use a bunch hacked accounts to buy whatever you bought a call on, pushing the price above your call point and chaining together a bunch of finance bro stuff to push your earnings way above what you'd even be stealing directly. Plus none of that money went into your account, your shell company just got lucky buy

Blockchain AI

[sdinfoserv]

Remember when we used to mock this?
It's still mock-worthy...

A fool and his tokens are soon parted

[Mirnotoriety]

We’ve officially reached the point where the two biggest hype cycles of the decade are merging into a Kaiju of pure financial chaos, and the results are going to be spectacular to watch from a safe distance.

We are actively building a playground where autonomous bots will wash-trade with other autonomous bots, responding to AI-generated news feeds, all while the actual humans sit back and wonder where their principal went.

This isn't financial evolution. It’s just optimizing the velocity at

c'mon bro, a few more tokens and it's fixed

[Thud457]

No problemo, the agent can use your crypto to buy more tokens./jk (as of 6/12/2026)


Are the cryptobros that stoopid or do they think we're that stupid?!!

Re: A fool and his tokens are soon parted

[mcmonkey]

Not soon enough, apparently.

"I'm too stupid and impatient to lose all my own money. Maybe this computer can help!"

How many 'agents'?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I realize that it's a better hype piece if we assume that the 157000 'agents' are fancy chatbots; but this is just an HTTP API; on what basis are they distinguishing between 'agents' in the currently trendy sense and someone's little script around cURL or whatever?

terms and conditions?

[kencurry]

Have to say if you are naive enough to do this you are probably not the type who reads the "terms and conditions" page anyways. Why does this bother me? Not my thing so I shouldn't care at all. But still, I don't want to see society go to complete shit quite yet.

What could

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Coinbase Launches Tool To Let AI Agents Manage Trading and Payments"

Obligatory "what could possibly go wrong?" post.

Humans can Try it too

[regyfrancis]

Someone has set up a Bot that you can chat with: It's playing the part of the Super AI that runs the world - in the regularly turbulent 'YEAR OF THE RAT' in 2044. It requires an X402, USDC payment of two cents per question. It's on test-net polygon/USDC to save u the money :) Have a try: https://the-big-picture.info/ [the-big-picture.info]