Coinbase is rolling out "Coinbase for Agents," a dedicated setup to create accounts and sub-accounts for AI agents. 

Agents will get seamless access to trade, manage money, and make payments without users having to manually fund separate wallets, while users will be able to direct their bots using natural language to act on their behalf and pursue recurring strategies, like rebalancing their portfolios on a weekly basis. 

"I've personally been using this on my account to keep my portfolio in this target allocation," Head of AI Product at Coinbase Lincoln Murr told The Block in an interview. "I set it up to say, hey, every week run this automation for me, read the news, and if there's anything cool, you have a little bit of a slush fund to buy something. Go ahead and do it, throw $10 into it, and see what happens and learn from it."

The bots will also be able to conduct market research for users, and can be programmed to trade based on a particular thesis on an active or passive basis.  

Coinbase is not alone in opening up its platform to non-human users. Gemini and OKX, for instance, are also allowing users to give control to their AI setups. MetaMask is also rolling out its Agent Wallet, providing an agentic access point to the Ethereum ecosystem, while other firms are even experimenting with giving AI bots dedicated corporate credit cards. 

Agentic payments

Payments is a big part of Coinbase for Agents, which offers built-in support for x402, the open AI payments standard incubated by Coinbase, to power machine-to-machine transactions. This includes empowering bots to make micropayments to access paywalled content, premium APIs, data, or compute. 

According to previous reporting from The Block, over 10,000 online merchants have integrated x402, providing an alternative route for AI agents to access paid tools and content on a per-use basis through a dedicated agentic app store. 

"We are starting to see more of these use cases come to life around food delivery and broader agentic commerce," Murr, who co-developed the x402 and AgentKit tools at Coinbase, said. "There’s a whole suite of activities, both in terms of your agent being able to trade, manage money, as well as be able to pay for whatever you want across the internet."

x402 supports stablecoin alongside every other major payment rail, like cards and ACH.

Murr noted that Coinbase for Agents will launch with agentic access to Coinbase’s spot trading services, though the plan is to open access to the entire Coinbase suite of products, including derivatives and prediction markets. 

"We're introducing equities in like three weeks, prediction markets in early July," Murr said. "The goal is for every agent to have an isolated subaccount, be able to trade whatever they want within the Coinbase app and move pretty quickly to do that."

Safety rails

Safety has been a particular concern while developing Coinbase for Agents, Murr said. Users will be able to create isolated sandboxes for agents to operate in, limiting their access to their main Coinbase accounts, and set parameters, like transaction and withdrawal limits. 

"Soon you’ll also be able to set exact rules: maximum trade size, what it can interact with, how much it can spend," Coinbase wrote in the announcement. "The agent works within those parameters. Think of it like giving someone a dedicated budget card rather than your bank account. You define the limits. Your agent executes within them."

Murr noted that these safety features were designed, at least partially, with the fear of "what happens if your AI goes rogue" in mind.