Coinbase Lets AI Agents Trade Crypto and Pay for Research Data

Coinbase has launched a new AI agent that can execute cryptocurrency trades and purchase premium research on behalf of users, marking the latest push by financial platforms to automate high-speed decision-making. The move comes just days after Robinhood introduced similar trading agents.

Users can connect the agent directly to their Coinbase account or run it in an isolated sandbox for testing. The agent taps into Coinbase Advanced - the company's professional trading suite with tools like TradingView charts - to analyze markets, rebalance portfolios, follow custom investment strategies, or advise on one-off crypto trades.

Currently limited to crypto spot and derivatives markets, Coinbase plans to extend support to equities and prediction markets. Future updates will let users set guardrails such as maximum trade sizes and spending limits.

A key differentiator is Coinbase's integration with the x402 payment protocol, co-developed with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near. This standard lets the agent pay for premium research APIs and on-demand compute without requiring logins or subscriptions - enabling frictionless, agent-to-service payments.

Coinbase has been steadily building AI capabilities since launching AgentKit in 2024, which lets developers embed automated wallets into apps. Last December, it added an AI assistant for trading tips. The new agent also works inside ChatGPT and Claude via Coinbase's MCP server.

Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Product at Coinbase, said the goal is to create agents that can transact natively, combining exchange access with a payments protocol. "We're aiming to build a fundamentally different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents," he noted.

The broader industry is racing to enable agentic payments. Visa recently invested in Replit and struck a deal with OpenAI. Global regulators, including the Financial Stability Board, have called for strong safeguards as these tools proliferate.

Source: TechCrunch