Coinbase announced the launch of Agentic Wallets, a feature designed specifically for AI agents to own, trade, earn, and make payments. Coinbase is also enabling continuous, automated financial activity within limits set by humans.
Coinbase’s Agentic Wallets introduce a new paradigm in the interaction between autonomous software and blockchain marketplaces. The core concept is to enable AI agents to execute on-chain transactions without constant human intervention, enabling autonomous spending and trading, machine-to-machine payments via compute or API access, and a suite of plug-and-play “agent skills.”
At the infrastructure level, the wallets rely on the x402 payments protocol, designed to facilitate programmatic paywalls via APIs and automated cross-system transactions. According to the announcement, x402 has already processed over 50 million transactions, suggesting a proven operational foundation for automated payment flows. Furthermore, the Agentic Wallets incorporate gasless trading on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, to mitigate disruptions from fee spikes and make the agents’ financial operations more predictable.
Coinbase positions the launch as key infrastructure for an emerging “Agent Economy,” in which AI systems act as direct participants in blockchain markets.
The advantages Coinbase offers in its protocol design
The product design incorporates multi-level controls intended to balance autonomy and oversight. These include spending limits and session caps that restrict how much and for how long an agent can operate. Granular controls are also included over allowed tokens, smart contracts with which it can interact, and authorized destination addresses.
On the compliance front, real-time Know Your Transaction (KYT) detection allows for flagging or blocking flows linked to sanctions, fraud, or other illicit activities. Simultaneously, secure key custody and the use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) aim to prevent private keys from being exposed to the agent’s code, keeping them within hardened infrastructure.
Together, this architecture aims to mitigate critical risks such as uncontrolled spending, credential compromise, and regulatory exposure. Multichain support expands the operational reach of agents, allowing them to interact with diverse DeFi ecosystems and decentralized applications.
From a market perspective, the launch opens the door to new revenue and cost models: agents that automatically pay for data, computing, or API services; that execute automated DeFi strategies; or that monetize content without human interaction.
The practical impact of Agentic Wallets will depend on their adoption by developers, the robustness of their safeguards under real-world conditions, and how well they coordinate with other emerging infrastructures designed to enable payments and commerce between autonomous agents.
