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Coinbase adds agent payments
Coinbase said Coinbase Business users can accept USDC payments from AI agents through the x402 payment standard, using Coinbase Payments and “no separate checkout flow,” as part of a broader rollout of payment, trading, and developer tools.
“Coinbase has introduced a new service allowing its business clients to receive payments directly from artificial intelligence agents”
The company said x402 was first introduced in May 2025 to enable stablecoin payments over HTTP for AI agents, applications and APIs, and it framed the products as support for the “agentic economy.”
Coinbase also tied the expansion to usage on its Base documentation pages, saying “agent-generated traffic surpassed human traffic” there for the first time last month.
For users running agents, Coinbase for Agents added live order lists that stream an agent’s open and active orders, alongside conditional instructions expressed in plain language, such as “buy ETH if it dips 5%” and “sell when an order fills.”
Numbers, wallets, and limits
Techi cited CoinDesk reporting that there were roughly 131,000 x402 transactions a day worth about $28,000 in March, with an average payment near $0.20.
Chainalysis data cited by Techi said the average x402 payer wallet was 197 days old and held 26 tokens, compared with 423 days and four tokens for a typical Base user.
Techi said final settlement means “no chargebacks and no recourse,” and it added that nothing in the release tells a merchant who the human behind a paying agent is.
Techi also described the protocol mechanic as reviving HTTP 402, with a server answering a request with 402 and a price, while the client—an agent with a funded wallet—pays in USDC over HTTP and retries.
Developers and business stakes
Coinbase said it also released an x402 SDK for developers building agent-powered applications, and Techi described it as adding payment acceptance to an API, an MCP server or a web service in roughly three lines of code.
“Los clientes corporativos de Coinbase ahora pueden aceptar pagos de agentes de IA A partir de esta semana, los usuarios de Coinbase Business podrán aceptar pagos de agentes de IA, realizados a través del protocolo x402, desarrollado e incubado por la plataforma”
Techi said Coinbase was paying 3.35% on idle USDC balances sitting in Coinbase Business accounts, while DiarioBitcoin said the company claimed instant settlement and “sin riesgo de contracargos.”
CoinDesk’s Spanish-language writeup quoted Sid Coelho-Prabhu describing the “experience” as delivering a familiar checkout flow for agents, saying “Los agentes, por un lado de la transacción, irán a leer la documentación” and then “están listos para comprar.”
Across the coverage, Coinbase positioned the rollout as infrastructure for autonomous AI agents to make payments and execute trades, while the stakes for businesses centered on how agent-driven transactions settle and how merchants reconcile and cash out within Coinbase Business accounts.
