Coinbase Launches New Wallets to Let AI Agents Access and Trade Cryptocurrency

Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange platform, announced the launch of Agentic Wallet on Wednesday. The move comes amid rising interest in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can execute tasks autonomously, including financial operations on blockchain networks. While AI agents have advanced in analysis and recommendations, executing transactions with real funds has remained limited by the need for human oversight and secure key management. The company says the new infrastructure addresses that gap by providing agents with dedicated wallets designed for autonomous use.

Coinbase Introduces Agentic Wallets

In a post on its Developer Platform, the crypto trading firm announced and detailed the new feature. Agentic Wallets are claimed to be the first wallet system built specifically for AI agents instead of human users. The company says the new technology is built on top of its existing AgentKit infrastructure, which focuses on embedding wallet features into agents. With the new tool, the primary focus is on supplying pre-configured wallets that any agent can adopt rapidly.

The setup allows agents to hold assets such as USDC, send payments, trade tokens, and earn yields without direct access to private keys. It includes a library of built-in skills covering authentication, funding, asset transfers, trading, and yield generation. These components are available in a dedicated GitHub repository, allowing developers to extend agent behaviours without handling low-level transaction details.

On security, Coinbase says the Agentic Wallets operate as non-custodial, with private keys stored in Trusted Execution Environments within Coinbase's infrastructure. Programmable controls enforce session spending limits, transaction size restrictions, and Know Your Transaction screening to identify potentially risky activities. Additionally, the full Coinbase Developer Platform security suite supports compliance and monitoring.

The x402 protocol serves as the underlying payments standard, developed for machine-to-machine transactions, application programming interface (API) paywalls and programmatic access. It is said to have processed more than 50 million transactions to date. Additionally, it also offers gasless trading on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network for ongoing operations, eliminating fee barriers.

Coming to potential use cases, the company says agents could monitor market conditions and adjust positions automatically. Machine economies might involve agents paying for computational resources or data via programmatic payments. Agentic commerce could enable independent monetisation of outputs or participation in creator networks. The infrastructure starts with strong support on Base, with multi-chain elements noted as possible expansions.