AI Agents Finally Get Their Own Wallets
Coinbase has launched Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for AI agents, enabling them to spend, earn, and trade cryptocurrency autonomously without waiting for human approval at every transaction. CEO Brian Armstrong announced the product on February 11, calling it "the next unlock for AI agents."
The problem Agentic Wallets solve is straightforward. Today's AI agents can recommend trades, identify profitable strategies, and analyze markets in real time. But the moment they need to actually execute a financial action, they hit a wall. They cannot pay for an API call, execute a swap, or fund a position without a human manually approving each step. Agentic Wallets remove that bottleneck by giving agents their own programmable wallets with built-in spending controls.
Five Skills, One CLI Command
The core product ships as a curated library of plug-and-play capabilities that Coinbase calls "skills." Developers get five out of the box: Authenticate, Fund, Send, Trade, and Earn. Each skill abstracts away the complexity of onchain operations so that building an agent with financial autonomy does not require writing custom transaction logic from scratch.
The developer experience is designed for speed. A single CLI command (npm create onchain-agent@latest) spins up a fully functional agent with wallet support and a customizable frontend. Coinbase claims developers can go from zero to a deployed autonomous agent in under two minutes. Additional skills can be integrated through the open-source agent-wallet-skills repository on GitHub, which already supports an expanding library of onchain actions.
Gasless trading on Base is a particularly significant feature. Agents can swap any token on Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 without needing to hold or manage ETH for gas fees. This eliminates one of the most persistent friction points in onchain automation: the requirement to maintain a separate gas token balance. For agents operating autonomously, running out of gas mid-operation is not just inconvenient, it can break entire workflows.
The Security Architecture Behind Autonomous Finance
Giving AI agents autonomous control over money raises an obvious question: what stops a hallucinating language model from draining a wallet? Coinbase built Agentic Wallets with multiple layers of programmable guardrails designed to keep agents on a leash.
Session caps let developers set maximum spending limits for each agent session. Once the cap is hit, the agent cannot initiate new transactions until the next session begins. Transaction limits add a per-transaction ceiling, preventing any single operation from exceeding a predetermined amount.
The most critical security layer is enclave isolation. Private keys are stored inside secure Coinbase infrastructure and are never exposed to the agent's prompt context or the underlying LLM. This means even if an agent's conversation is compromised or its prompt is injected with malicious instructions, the private keys remain inaccessible. The architecture draws on the same MPC (Multi-Party Computation) technology that Coinbase uses to secure its institutional custody products.
Built-in KYT (Know Your Transaction) screening automatically blocks interactions flagged as high-risk. This compliance layer runs in the background, screening every transaction against risk databases before it settles onchain.
x402: The Payment Rails for Agent Commerce
Agentic Wallets are built on top of the x402 protocol, the HTTP-native payment standard that Coinbase developed with Cloudflare to enable machine-to-machine payments. The x402 protocol revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, embedding payment logic directly into web requests. When an agent hits a paywalled endpoint, the server responds with a payment requirement, the agent authorizes the payment, and the transaction settles on Base in roughly 200 milliseconds.
The timing of this launch is notable. On the same day, Stripe adopted x402 for its Base integration, enabling developers to charge AI agents directly in USDC. Having both the world's largest crypto exchange and the world's largest payments processor converge on the same agentic payment protocol within hours signals that this infrastructure category is moving from experimental to production-grade.
x402 operates on a generous pricing model: 1,000 free transactions per month, then $0.001 per transaction. For AI agents that might execute hundreds of micro-payments per day across data providers, compute services, and API calls, the cost structure is designed to be negligible.
What This Means for the Broader Crypto Ecosystem
Coinbase is not the only company racing to build financial infrastructure for AI agents. The Crypto.com Super Bowl campaign included the launch of an AI agent platform tied to its $70 million AI.com domain acquisition. OKX has been building self-custody tools that could eventually serve agent use cases. The competitive dynamic is clear: every major crypto exchange wants to be the default financial backend for autonomous AI.
For crypto card users, the connection is less direct but architecturally significant. The security primitives powering Agentic Wallets, including MPC key management and enclave isolation, are the same technologies that protect self-custody card private keys and secure stablecoin spending infrastructure. As AI agents become economic actors, the same compliance and security standards that govern human crypto spending will need to scale to machine-driven transactions.
The gasless Base trading also demonstrates something broader: Ethereum Layer 2 economics have reached a point where transaction costs are low enough to support autonomous micro-payments at scale. This is the same cost structure that makes everyday crypto card spending practical, fractions of a cent per transaction instead of the multi-dollar gas fees that plagued Ethereum mainnet.
The Developer Bet
Coinbase's strategy with Agentic Wallets mirrors its broader developer platform playbook. By making it trivially easy to give agents financial autonomy, Coinbase positions Base as the default settlement layer for agentic commerce. Every agent wallet deployed through AgentKit is a wallet on Base. Every gasless trade generates activity on Base. Every x402 payment settles on Base.
The AgentKit framework is designed to be both framework-agnostic (it works with any AI framework) and wallet-agnostic (it integrates with any wallet provider), but the path of least resistance points squarely at Coinbase infrastructure. Developers who choose the default configuration get Base, Coinbase custody, and x402 settlement without writing any additional code.
Whether agentic commerce becomes a meaningful economic category in 2026 remains uncertain. But with Stripe validating x402 on the same day Coinbase ships the wallet infrastructure, the building blocks are converging faster than most predicted.
FAQ
What are Coinbase Agentic Wallets? Agentic Wallets are wallet infrastructure built for AI agents, allowing them to autonomously execute financial transactions including spending, earning, and trading crypto on Base chain with built-in security guardrails like session caps, transaction limits, and enclave-isolated private keys.
How do Agentic Wallets keep funds safe from AI hallucinations? Private keys are stored in secure Coinbase enclaves and are never exposed to the AI agent's prompt or the underlying language model. Session caps limit total spending per session, transaction limits cap individual operations, and KYT screening blocks high-risk interactions automatically.
What is the x402 protocol? x402 is an HTTP-native payment standard developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare that enables machine-to-machine payments. It uses the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code to embed payment logic directly into web requests, settling transactions on Base in approximately 200 milliseconds.
Do agents need to hold ETH for gas fees? No. Agentic Wallets support gasless trading on Base, meaning agents can execute token swaps and transactions without maintaining a separate ETH balance for gas costs.
Overview
Coinbase has launched Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure purpose-built for AI agents, with five plug-and-play skills (Authenticate, Fund, Send, Trade, Earn), gasless trading on Base, and security guardrails including session caps, transaction limits, and enclave-isolated private keys. Built on the x402 payment protocol, the product lets developers deploy autonomous agents with financial capabilities in under two minutes via a single CLI command. The launch coincides with Stripe's same-day x402 adoption, signaling rapid convergence around agentic commerce infrastructure.
Recommended Reading
- Stripe Launches x402 Payments on Base, Letting Developers Charge AI Agents Directly in USDC
- Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek Drops $70 Million on AI.com and Launches an AI Agent Platform During the Super Bowl
- OKX CEO Star Draws a Hard Line Between DEX Self-Custody and CEX Compliance as CeDeFi Blurs the Boundary
