Coinbase CEO touts agentic finance as Base tops 100M AI payments
Brian Armstrong argues AI will boost, not diminish, crypto by creating demand for programmable money and autonomous financial services. He says AI agents will need crypto rails like Base, USDC, and x402 to make machine-to-machine payments without traditional banking or manual checkout. Coinbase’s vision for “agentic finance” centers on AI systems acting as economic participants that can pay for APIs, data, and digital resources. Base, launched in 2023 as a general-purpose Ethereum layer-2, now serves as the network foundation, while x402 enables automated stablecoin payments over the HTTP 402 standard using USDC. Interest is growing quickly: Chainalysis said x402-related activity on Base exceeded 100 million transactions in about nine months, suggesting agentic payments are becoming a meaningful use case for crypto infrastructure.
