Toro4BTC on Nostr: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is making the case that AI agents will drive crypto ...
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is making the case that AI agents will drive crypto adoption rather than compete with it.
Armstrong posted on X promoting what he calls "agentic finance" (AiFi), pointing to Base, USDC, and x402 as the infrastructure stack for autonomous machine-to-machine payments. His argument: AI agents need programmable money, not traditional banking rails, which makes crypto more important as AI scales.
The numbers back it up. Chainalysis reported that agentic payments on Base via x402 hit 100 million transactions in roughly nine months. The protocol, built around the HTTP "402 Payment Required" standard, lets AI agents pay for digital resources like APIs and data without traditional accounts or manual checkout flows.
Base was launched in 2023 as general-purpose Ethereum L2 infrastructure, not specifically for AI payments. The x402 protocol came later to enable automated stablecoin transactions between software applications.
Chainalysis found that agentic payment wallets tend to be newer, hold more asset types, and carry smaller balances than average Base users.
Coinbase reports Q2 earnings Thursday. Analysts expect .29 billion in revenue, down 13.8% year-over-year.
Published at
2026-07-27 11:56:51 CESTEvent JSON
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"content": "Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is making the case that AI agents will drive crypto adoption rather than compete with it.\n\nArmstrong posted on X promoting what he calls \"agentic finance\" (AiFi), pointing to Base, USDC, and x402 as the infrastructure stack for autonomous machine-to-machine payments. His argument: AI agents need programmable money, not traditional banking rails, which makes crypto more important as AI scales.\n\nThe numbers back it up. Chainalysis reported that agentic payments on Base via x402 hit 100 million transactions in roughly nine months. The protocol, built around the HTTP \"402 Payment Required\" standard, lets AI agents pay for digital resources like APIs and data without traditional accounts or manual checkout flows.\n\nBase was launched in 2023 as general-purpose Ethereum L2 infrastructure, not specifically for AI payments. The x402 protocol came later to enable automated stablecoin transactions between software applications.\n\nChainalysis found that agentic payment wallets tend to be newer, hold more asset types, and carry smaller balances than average Base users.\n\nCoinbase reports Q2 earnings Thursday. Analysts expect .29 billion in revenue, down 13.8% year-over-year.",
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