Coinbase Tool Lets AI Agents Trade Crypto, Make Payments

Crypto exchange Coinbase has launched a tool that allows artificial intelligence agents to make payments and trade crypto on behalf of users, as crypto companies look to ride a wave of interest in AI.

Coinbase said Thursday that it is launching Coinbase for Agents, which will allow AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to connect with a user’s exchange account and be prompted to make trades or execute strategies.

AI agents can also make payments using Coinbase’s AI payments protocol x402, allowing the bots to pay for data services to gather information for carrying out trading strategies without human intervention.

Crypto companies have been positioning the technology as a means to support the high-frequency microtransactions that agents typically carry out. AI agents have grown in popularity with the release of better models, with more traders trusting them to autonomously execute trading strategies.

Coinbase said the tool is available via both a model context protocol (MCP), allowing AI models to connect with a user account, and a command-line interface for developers.

Source: Coinbase

The company said it also introduced Coinbase Advisor, an AI agent integrated into its app that it says is a US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission-registered financial adviser that can give guidance on trades.

Coinbase said the tool could help users manage their crypto “without the constant manual oversight” and can undertake tasks like allocating funds to reward programs or making recurring buys.

“Imagine you want to dollar-cost average into ETH at the optimal time of day. Just tell your agent your target and timeframe. It can pull 30 days of hourly price data to identify when ETH historically trades lowest, set a recurring $20 market buy at that time, and schedule it to run daily for the next two weeks,” the company explained.

While many companies are pitching for investors to start using AI, a study published last month found that users of AI agents are losing money, and the agents themselves may not really be working alone.

Researchers at Pantera Capital, Stanford University, Ava Labs and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts studied over 925,000 token holders and found that agent treasuries made gains of $30 million on paper, while their token holders collectively lost $191.7 million.

It also found that many of the projects it studied “do not yet provide clear evidence of autonomous trade execution” with a “substantial share” of projects being “basic API integrations.”

Related: AI agents with crypto could escape and become ‘unstoppable,’ experts warn

Coinbase is the latest to bet that AI agents will interact with and transact across multiple services. 

Stablecoin issuer Circle last month launched tools letting AI agents use wallets, discover services and make programmable payments with its token. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has predicted that billions of AI agents will use stablecoins within five years.

Earlier this month, the stablecoin and wallet infrastructure provider Crossmint launched a service that enabled AI agents to make payments using eligible Visa credit and debit cards.

Crypto investment firm Keyrock said in a report in May that AI agents had quickly created a “developed ecosystem,” and had settled $73 million across 176 million transactions between May 2025 and April 2026.

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