Coinbase Unveils Agentic Wallets to Let AI Agents Hold, Trade and Spend Crypto Autonomously

Coinbase, the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange and infrastructure provider, has launched a groundbreaking new product called Agentic Wallets — the first wallet infrastructure purpose-built for autonomous artificial intelligence agents. Launched via the Coinbase Developer Platform, the wallets enable AI agents to hold funds, execute blockchain transactions and manage digital assets without direct human intervention, ushering in a new era of machine-driven financial operations on decentralized networks.

The move reflects Coinbase’s strategic effort to become foundational infrastructure for the emerging agentic economy, where software agents act as independent economic participants rather than passive tools. Built around the x402 payments protocol — a machine-to-machine transaction standard that has already processed over 50 million transactions — Agentic Wallets support programmable autonomous activity such as trading, earning yield, paying fees and moving funds within crypto ecosystems like Base, Coinbase’s Layer-2 network on Ethereum.

Unlike traditional wallets designed for human users, these wallets feature enterprise-grade security and guardrails — including session limits, transaction caps and compliance screening — ensuring that agents operate within safe, predictable boundaries. Developers can deploy and fund wallets in under two minutes using Coinbase’s command-line tools and a prebuilt library of functions, accelerating adoption and experimentation across decentralized finance (DeFi) and agent-enabled applications.

Key Highlights

• New wallet infrastructure: Coinbase launches Agentic Wallets specifically for AI agents to autonomously hold, send and trade crypto.
• Autonomous operation: Agents can act independently without human approval on financial decisions.
• Powered by x402 protocol: The wallets use the machine-to-machine x402 standard, already battle-tested with millions of transactions.
• Gasless functionality: Support for gasless trading on Coinbase’s Base network helps avoid interruptions in automated operations.
• Built-in security controls: Programmable spending limits, session caps and compliance checks protect against unintended behavior.
• Developer-friendly: Command-line tools and plug-and-play financial functions help developers spin up wallets quickly.

What Are Agentic Wallets and Why They Matter

Traditionally, AI agents — software programs that can make decisions or automate tasks — have been limited to advisory roles: suggesting trades, summarising market data or generating recommendations. They lacked the ability to execute financial actions autonomously, such as moving funds or paying for services. Agentic Wallets change this by giving agents independent custody and transactional capabilities on blockchain networks.

The introduction of these wallets is a pivotal moment in both AI and decentralized finance (DeFi), as it enables machine-to-machine economies where AI agents can participate as economic actors:

• Autonomous DeFi strategies: Agents can monitor liquidity positions, rebalance portfolios, and execute yield-optimising strategies without human timing.
• Machine commerce: Software bots can pay for compute power, API access, data streams and network fees programmatically.
• Trading and yield earning: Agents can perform token trades and earn interest on idle funds, anytime around the clock.

These capabilities help bridge the gap between data-driven decisions and financial execution — a critical step for advanced AI adoption in decentralized systems and the broader machine economy.

Security, Guardrails and Developer Tools

Coinbase emphasises that autonomy does not mean unrestricted access. Agentic Wallets include programmable guardrails and security features such as:

• Session caps and per-transaction limits to control spending.
• Compliance-ready screening that automatically flags risky interactions.
• Enclave key isolation, where private keys are stored in secure environments rather than exposed to the AI models, reducing the risk of misuse.

For developers, Coinbase’s AgentKit tools and command-line interface simplify wallet creation and funding, with built-in libraries of financial functions. These tools obviate the need to write low-level camera code or transaction logic, lowering the technical barriers to building agentic applications.

Industry Implications and Future Outlook

The introduction of Agentic Wallets arrives as AI systems advance from advice-oriented roles to autonomous execution — an evolution that could reshape how financial actions are performed in crypto and beyond. By enabling AI agents to manage assets and transact on behalf of users, Coinbase positions itself at the frontier of agentic commerce infrastructure, alongside broader trends in machine-to-machine payments and AI-driven market participation.

As programmable economic behavior becomes more mainstream, developers, enterprises and decentralized ecosystems may increasingly leverage AI agents for continuous, 24/7 financial operations — a transformation with implications for trading, DeFi automation, index rebalancing, liquidity provisioning and even AI-mediated service markets.

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