5 Minutes
Coinbase releases Agentic Wallets to power autonomous AI trading
Coinbase has unveiled a new wallet infrastructure tailored for AI agents — autonomous programs that can make decisions and interact with blockchains. The company says these 'Agentic Wallets' enable agents to spend, earn, and trade crypto on behalf of users, expanding agents' role from advisory assistants to active market participants in DeFi and onchain commerce.
What Agentic Wallets enable
Built to extend Coinbase's earlier work on agent integration, Agentic Wallets let users configure permissions and controls so an AI agent can operate a wallet autonomously. According to Coinbase engineers Erik Reppel and Josh Nickerson, agents will be able to manage liquidity positions, rebalance portfolios, execute trades, and cover costs such as compute, API access, and storage — all without a human clicking 'approve' each time, as long as permissions are set.
Source: Coinbase Developer Platform
Agentic Wallets expand the capabilities of current agents, which typically answer queries, summarize documents, or help complete tasks but lack the ability to execute onchain orders. Now, agents can monitor decentralized finance (DeFi) yields around the clock and react to shifting opportunities across networks.
Built on AgentKit and x402 payments protocol
Reppel and Nickerson said Agentic Wallets build on Coinbase's AgentKit framework, first introduced in November 2024, which allowed developers to embed wallet functionality into agents. Transactions flow over Coinbase's x402, a purpose-built payments protocol designed for autonomous AI use cases. Coinbase reports x402 has already processed millions of transactions, and it enables agents to acquire API keys, purchase compute, subscribe to premium data, and pay for storage — creating self-sustaining machine economies.
Agents can operate on Ethereum layer-2 network Base, giving them access to faster, lower-cost trading and liquidity management. As Coinbase put it, users can 'build agents that monitor yields across protocols, execute trades on Base and manage liquidity positions 24/7' — meaning an agent could rebalance at 3 a.m. if permissions allow.
AI agents on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
The same day, Lightning Labs released tools for AI agents to transact on Bitcoin's Lightning Network using the L402 protocol standard. These tools let agents run Lightning nodes and manage Lightning wallets holding native Bitcoin without requiring access to users' private keys.
The AI agents can also run a Lightning node and manage a Lightning wallet containing native Bitcoin BTC $67,028 without access to the private keys.
This development signals growing interoperability between agentic AI and multiple crypto rails — from Ethereum L2s like Base to Bitcoin's low-latency Lightning network — enabling AI-driven commerce, payments, and DeFi strategies.
Industry momentum and broader context
Crypto executives are bullish on agentic AI. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire forecasts billions of AI agents transacting with crypto and stablecoins for everyday payments within a few years. Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has also predicted crypto will become the 'native currency for AI agents.' Outside the crypto industry, Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol and Agent Payment Protocol 2 to enable agentic commerce using Google Pay as a default handler for fiat in some markets.
Meanwhile, other crypto firms are launching agent-based services: Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek unveiled ai.com to let users create personal agents for email, scheduling, shopping, and travel planning — illustrating the rapid convergence of AI automation and digital money.
What this means for users and developers
For users, Agentic Wallets offer a path to continuous, permissioned automated management of crypto holdings, yield farming strategies, and payments. For developers, AgentKit and x402 present new tooling to build commerce-capable agents that interact securely with onchain protocols and offchain services. As agentic architectures mature, expect more protocols and wallets to introduce standards that balance automation with user safety, custody choices, and granular permissioning.
In short, Coinbase's Agentic Wallets and complementary tools from Lightning Labs mark a significant step toward fully autonomous, crypto-native AI agents that can navigate DeFi, make payments, and support new machine-driven economies.
Source: cointelegraph
Comments
blocktone
is this even true? agent wallets doing trades, paying for compute, buy data... who audits permissions, can users yank access fast enough? sounds risky, curious how they secure keys
datapulse
wow didnt expect wallets to go full autonomous, kinda wild. if agents trade 24/7 what about rogue logic, gas fees, privacy? curious but nervous
Leave a Comment