Coinbase for Agents lets AI assistants trade crypto and move money

Coinbase Global Inc. today launched Coinbase for Agents, a standalone tool that lets artificial intelligence agents trade cryptocurrency, pay for services and operate with financial autonomy directly from assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT.

The product is not a feature inside the Coinbase app but a separate account built for agents. Users connect an existing Coinbase account, set spending limits and the agent can begin transacting on their behalf. Coinbase is pitching it as potentially the only account an agent will ever need.

Coinbase for Agents builds on work the company started in 2024 with AgentKit, which gave developers the ability to put wallets in the hands of agents. It later added Coinbase Advisor, an AI agent inside the Coinbase app offering recommendations and execution. The new tool extends that approach to third-party agents people already use.

At launch, an agent can trade crypto spot markets and derivatives, operating either from an isolated portfolio or from the user’s main account balance. Coinbase said it will add equities, prediction markets and other asset classes available on its platform over time. The trading capability draws on Coinbase Advanced, the company’s professional-grade service, accessible through natural language rather than manual execution.

Users define how much autonomy to grant. An agent can be asked for a onetime recommendation, set to make a trade a day for a week, or handed a thesis and left to run a strategy on its own.

The payments side leans on x402, an open standard for machine-to-machine payments that Coinbase originated. With native x402 support, an agent will be able to pay for individual services such as paywalled research, data application programming interfaces and on-demand compute without logins or subscriptions. In one workflow, an agent could pay a few cents for data normally behind a paywall, synthesize it and execute a trade based on the result.

Coinbase said stablecoins are its preferred payment rail for the use case because they are programmable, global and operate continuously, though x402 is built to support other payment methods. The company also said the account is positioned for agentic shopping and checkout flows as those come online.

On the security side, Coinbase said granting an agent financial autonomy does not require handing over full account access. An agent can run inside an isolated sandbox with no visibility into a user’s other holdings or draw on the main account, touching only what the user assigns. The company said it will soon let users set exact rules covering maximum trade size, what an agent can interact with and how much it can spend.

The launch comes as agentic commerce gains momentum. Coinbase cited projections that agents moving money on users’ behalf could account for roughly 20% of the e-commerce market by 2030. More than half of internet traffic is already nonhuman, the company said.

Coinbase for Agents is live today, with support documentation for connecting an agent available at launch.

Photo: Coinbase

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