Coinbase calls AI payments its 'most high-conviction bet' as businesses begin accepting agent payments

Coinbase Business is expanding its suite of AI tools to help its business clients onboard into the agentic economy, according to an announcement on Thursday. 

Namely, the exchange is rolling out a payments stack that will enable businesses to accept payments from AI bots. The solution is powered by Coinbase Payments, and uses the x402 open internet payments standard incubated by Coinbase. 

"A business owner can now sell their stuff to agents online," Head of Coinbase Business Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu told The Block in an interview. "It's not any extra work. They can already sell their products, goods and services to humans today using Coinbase Business; we're just going to add a separate lane in the same product for agents."

"Agents can come in and speak machine-friendly language, consummate the transaction and move on to the next task," Coelho-Prabhu added, explaining how x402 works. 

The move comes on the heels of Coinbase Business’ first anniversary, having officially launched in June 2025. Since then, Coelho-Prabhu said the unit has signed up about 5,000 customers, with about $1 billion in combined payments and trading volume, and grown to about 12 employees. 

It’s worth noting that Coelho-Prabhu, a veteran of the exchange for almost nine years, previously led the Coinbase Wallet team, which he calls his first "0-1" product at Coinbase. (Coinbase Wallet has since rebranded to the Base App.) 

Coelho-Prabhu said that agentic payments are one of Coinbase’s "most high-conviction bets." 

"We saw the writing on the wall starting two or three years ago, or even earlier, that this would be one of the big story arcs of the internet," he said. "And we started to invest."

Indeed, Coinbase continues to roll out AI tools across its platform. On Thursday, the exchange noted it’s shipping Coinbase for Agents, which enables users to integrate their AI setups into their trading and investment workflows, as well as a software development kit that makes it easier to add x402 payments accessibility across the web.

The exchange has also previously announced tools like Coinbase Advisor, a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered AI-powered financial advisor that will deliver tailored investment advice and commentary to users. 

While the growth in agentic payments volumes has been arguably muted, Coelho-Prabhu said there have been signs that the bots are multiplying. For instance, starting in June, around 53% of web traffic for the Base blockchain’s documentation came from agentic visitors, a Coinbase spokesperson told The Block. 

With Thursday's launch, Coelho-Prabhu said Coinbase now has a complete end-to-end system where agents discover Coinbase’s CDP docs, spin up an agent wallet, get funded, pay a merchant that accepts via Coinbase Business, and settle on Base or other chains in USDC, following years of building those individual pieces. 

Coelho-Prabhu said agents are making real transactions for real businesses. So far these are businesses in the "digital infrastructure space," using bots to buy Open Router credits, domain names or pay for Amazon or Google Cloud storage, for example. 

"Those are the earliest adopters of agentic commerce," he said. "Beyond that, the next wave — we are very, very close, I think, to seeing an explosion of more normie commerce."