Coinbase’s corporate customers can now accept payments from AI agents

U.S.-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) has moved to close what it sees as gaps in the AI agentic economy, stitching together ways for businesses to be paid by agents, while better accommodating users putting agents to work trading and researching, as well as the developers building for agents.

Rolling out this week, Coinbase Business users will be able to accept payments from AI agents, done via the x402 protocol, developed and incubated by the exchange. This means a business can now let an agent pay in USDC, with no extra setup, powered by Coinbase Payments, according to a press release on Thursday.

Sid Coelho-Prabhu, Head of Coinbase Business, said any shopping scenario has two sides: a shopper armed with a credit card and bank account goes into a store where a merchant has a point of sale system and bank account, and the two shake hands at the checkout.

“We are delivering that experience for the new online agentic economy,” Coelho-Prabhu said in an interview. “Agents, on one side of the transaction, will go and read the Coinbase developer docs, create a wallet for themselves, and are ready to shop. Then we empower businesses so that everything in their inventory is now available on the internet through this agent-friendly checkout flow.”

For users of the exchange, they can get an easier command of crypto markets with a live order list that streams an agent’s open and active orders in real time, showing status, price, and size so the user can supervise every move, Coinbase said in a press release.

This will put agentic trading at the user’s fingertips, with the agent getting real-time market data and the ability to act on conditions autonomously. “Tell it what you want in plain English – ‘buy ETH if it dips 5%,’ ‘sell when my order fills’ – and it watches the market and executes for you. The same WebSocket data that powers institutional desks is now accessible through natural language,” Coinbase said.

In addition, for developers there’s a new x402 SDK from Coinbase Developer Platform, builders can now add x402 payment acceptance to any API, MCP server, or web service in 3 lines of code.