Morning Minute: Coinbase Gives AI Agents Their Own Wallets

Morning Minute is simply a regular newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The investigation and opinions expressed are his ain and bash not needfully bespeak those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s apical news:

• Crypto majors rebound aft beardown jobs report; BTC +1% astatine $68,000

• BlackRock lists its BUIDL Fund connected Uniswap, buys UNI tokens

• Coinbase launched agentic wallets, natively supporting x402

• Analysts slash COIN targets up of today’s Q4 net call

• Lighter becomes archetypal DEX to connection Korean equities, besides debuts backing complaint rebates

AI cause commerce (agentic commerce) is heating up onchain.

And Coinbase is leaning in.

Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets on Tuesday, the archetypal wallet infrastructure built specifically for autonomous AI agents.

The merchandise lets immoderate AI cause clasp funds, nonstop payments, commercialized tokens, gain yield, and transact onchain without quality intervention.

Developers tin rotation up a afloat functional cause wallet successful nether 2 minutes utilizing a command-line instrumentality (npx awal), with pre-built fiscal “skills” including authenticate, fund, send, trade, and earn.

Coinbase Launches Wallet for AI Agents With Built-In Guardrails

The wallets tally connected Coinbase’s Base L2 with gasless transactions, truthful agents ne'er stall retired connected web fees. They travel with programmable spending limits (session caps, per-transaction ceilings) and backstage keys enactment locked successful Coinbase’s unafraid enclaves, ne'er exposed to the cause oregon its underlying LLM. Built-in KYT (Know Your Transaction) screening automatically blocks high-risk interactions.

Critically, Agentic Wallets natively enactment x402 - Coinbase’s unfastened outgo protocol that embeds stablecoin payments straight into HTTP requests. That means agents tin browse the x402 Bazaar, observe paid APIs and services, and wage for them autonomously.

The x402 protocol has already processed implicit 50M transactions since launching past year, with Cloudflare co-founding the x402 Foundation successful September to propulsion it toward an unfastened standard. Google integrated x402 into its AP2 cause payments protocol. Visa, PayPal, and American Express are each gathering parallel cause outgo rails.

CEO Brian Armstrong commented connected the strategical bet, posting: “The adjacent unlock for AI agents conscionable launched.”

Erik Reppel, caput of engineering astatine Coinbase Developer Platform, and Josh Nickerson wrote successful the motorboat blog: “We’re moving from AI agents that counsel to agents that act. From assistants that suggest to helpers that execute.”