Coinbase CEO touts agentic finance as Base tops 100M AI payments

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is pushing back against calls for crypto to pivot to artificial intelligence, arguing AI agents will instead stoke demand for crypto-based financial services.Armstrong took to X on Sunday to tout agentic finance (AiFi), highlighting Coinbase’s Base network, USDC and x402 as the infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments.“AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto,” Armstrong wrote, because AI agents will need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails. “If anything, it makes crypto more important,” he added.His comments come as crypto companies increasingly position blockchain networks as payment infrastructure for AI agents, with agentic payment activity on Base topping 100 million transactions in June.How Coinbase’s AiFi stack came togetherArmstrong’s AiFi vision centers on the idea that AI agents will become active participants in the digital economy, making payments and interacting with financial services without human intervention.Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network designed to make onchain applications faster and cheaper to use. The network was built as general-purpose blockchain infr...