Coinbase launches an AI agent that can trade crypto and pay for research on your behalf

Coinbase has launched an AI agent that can execute crypto trades and pay for premium research data on behalf of users. The agent integrates with a user’s main Coinbase account or can operate in a separate sandbox. It trades spot crypto and derivatives markets, with support for equities and prediction markets planned next.

Users can ask the agent to rebalance their portfolio, follow an investment thesis and trade accordingly, or provide one-time advice on a specific trade. It can access Coinbase Advanced, the company’s professional trading platform, for analysis and execution. Custom limits for trade size, service access, and spending are coming soon.

The payments side is the more novel part. The agent uses x402, an open payment protocol Coinbase launched last year with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near. Using x402, the agent can pay for premium research data APIs and on-demand compute for trading insights without requiring any login or subscription. The protocol has already processed 75 million transactions and $24 million in volume over the past 30 days.

The agent also works inside ChatGPT and Claude through Coinbase’s MCP server. That means a user chatting with an AI assistant can ask it to make a trade, and the agent will execute it through the Coinbase integration without switching apps.

“Unlike pure trading platforms, we’re the only one that combines exchange access with a native payments protocol,” said Lincoln Murr, Coinbase’s Head of AI Product. “We’re aiming to build a fundamentally different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents.”

The launch comes days after Robinhood introduced its own AI agents that can trade for users. The race to build agentic AI in finance is accelerating across the industry. Visa invested in Replit last month to power agentic payments for developers and signed a deal with OpenAI this week to explore similar products. The Financial Stability Board has called for stronger safeguards to mitigate AI risks in financial services.

Coinbase has been building toward this for years. It launched AgentKit in 2024, letting developers integrate automated wallets into apps. It added an AI assistant to its main app last December. The latest agent is the most ambitious step yet, giving AI systems the ability to both trade and spend money autonomously within user-defined limits.

The implications are worth watching. AI-powered crypto exploits drained $600 million from DeFi in April alone. An agent that can trade and pay on a user’s behalf introduces a new attack surface. Coinbase says it will add custom spending controls, but the question regulators will ask is whether “user-defined limits” are enough when the agent is the one making the decisions. Bot traffic already exceeds human traffic online. Agentic finance is the next frontier, and the guardrails are still being built.