Coinbase has announced a wallet infrastructure tool called Agentic Wallets, designed to enable AI agents engage in spending, earning, and trading through digital assets. With this, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world has taken its first official steps into the agentic AI ecosystem.
Coinbase said the move is to facilitate the future of AI agents where they would will act, and not just advise like present day bots. From monitoring DeFi positions to paying for their own API access, Coinbase has projected that AI agents are already starting to participate in finalizing and initiating financial tasks.
“The next generation of agents will participate in creator economies and monetize their outputs. But to operate autonomously, agents need one fundamental capability they don’t have today: the ability to hold and manage money independently. That’s where Agentic Wallets come in,” the announcement post by Coinbase said.
In order to power machine-to-machine transactions, Coinbase developed the x402 payment system last year. This protocol has been installed as the heart of Agentic Wallets, Coinbase said. The x402 protocol provides AI agents with a machine-readable invoice that removes traditional paywalls.
“Already battle-tested with over 50M transactions, x402 enables machine-to-machine payments, API paywalls, and programmatic resource access without human intervention,” the exchange claimed.
The wallet infra, Coinbase said, would let AI agents keep facilitating transactions like trading going 24/7.
The infrastructure comes with an Agent Command Line (ACL) that will let the handlers of these AI bots check agent status and fund management. Users will be able to customize commands for their respective agents with “simple commands”.
As part of security guardrails, Agentic Wallets will let users to set caps on the amount of money AI agents could spend from its custody, control transaction sizes, and store private keys within the Coinbase ecosystem, away from the AI agent’s reach.
“Build agents that monitor yields across protocols, execute trades on Base and manage liquidity positions 24/7. ower agents that pay for their own resources using the x402 protocol and enable agents to participate in creator economies. Once agents can hold and manage money, entirely new application categories emerge,” Coinbase noted.