Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is pushing back against narratives that artificial intelligence competes with crypto, arguing instead that AI agents will drive fresh demand for blockchain-based financial infrastructure. Armstrong took to X this week to promote what he calls agentic finance, or AiFi, pointing to Coinbase’s Base network, the USDC stablecoin, and the x402 payment protocol as the core building blocks.
‘AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto,’ Armstrong wrote, adding that AI agents will require programmable money rather than traditional banking rails. ‘If anything, it makes crypto more important,’ he said.
How the AiFi Stack Was Built
Armstrong’s AiFi thesis rests on the premise that AI agents will become autonomous participants in financial markets, making payments and accessing services without human oversight.
Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network intended to make onchain applications faster and cheaper, designed as general-purpose infrastructure rather than specifically for AI payments.
Two years later, Coinbase introduced x402, a payment protocol built around the HTTP ‘402 Payment Required’ standard. The protocol enables automated stablecoin payments between software applications, allowing AI agents and other autonomous systems to pay for digital resources such as APIs and data without requiring traditional accounts or manual checkout processes.
USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin co-launched by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium in 2018, serves as one of the primary assets for x402 transactions, enabling software agents to execute automated payments. Base, x402, and USDC together form the backbone of Coinbase’s agentic payment infrastructure.
Base Tops 100 Million Agentic Transactions
Armstrong’s comments arrive as concrete data backs the adoption claim. Analytics firm Chainalysis reported in June that agentic payments on Base via x402 surpassed 100 million transactions within roughly nine months of activity.
Chainalysis tracked the activity by identifying x402-related payment flows onchain. Transactions worth at least $1 accounted for 95 percent of total value transferred across those payments. The firm also found that agentic payment wallets were typically newer accounts, held more asset types, and carried smaller balances than the average Base user.
The headline figure comes with an important caveat, however. Chainalysis noted that much of x402’s early transaction growth was driven by PING, a memecoin project that required users to make an x402 payment to mint tokens, rather than by autonomous agents purchasing useful services. Automated scripts and incentive campaigns can also generate x402 transfers, so the 100 million figure reflects a mix of activity rather than pure agent-driven commerce.
Earnings Outlook
Coinbase is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on Thursday. Analyst consensus pegs revenue at $1.29 billion, with sales estimated to show a 13.8 percent decline compared to the same period last year, according to Yahoo Finance data. Earnings per share are expected to come in flat.
