Coinbase Launches AI Agent Platform for Trading and Accessing Premium Research

As AI agents increasingly account for more internet traffic than human users, companies in the commerce and financial sectors are introducing tools that enable these agents to act on behalf of users at greater speed and efficiency. Just days after Robinhood unveiled agents designed to execute trades for users, Coinbase has introduced its own AI-powered agents that can carry out trades and purchase premium research services.

The company announced on Thursday that users can connect the agent directly to their primary Coinbase account and begin trading immediately. For those who prefer not to grant access to their main account, Coinbase also offers the option to run the agent within a separate sandbox environment.

According to Coinbase, the agent can leverage services such as Coinbase Advanced, the company’s platform aimed at professional traders that provides advanced capabilities, including TradingView charts, for market analysis and trade execution. Users can instruct the agent to rebalance portfolios, follow a specific investment thesis and trade accordingly, or provide guidance regarding a single cryptocurrency transaction.

Currently, the agent supports trading across crypto spot and derivatives markets. Coinbase said support for equities and prediction markets is expected to be added in the future. The company also noted that upcoming updates will introduce customizable controls, including limits on trade size, restrictions on which services the agent can access, and spending caps.

The new offering uses the open x402 payment protocol that Coinbase developed in partnership with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near last year. With this standard, the agent can pay for premium research data APIs and on-demand computing resources for trading insights, all without requiring users to manage subscriptions or logins. Coinbase also pointed to a website that lists the services available through the x402 protocol.

Coinbase has been steadily expanding its investment in AI technologies over the past several years. In 2024, the company introduced AgentKit, a toolkit that enables developers to integrate automated wallets into their applications. Last December, it rolled out an AI-driven assistant within its app that offers trading recommendations and financial guidance. Coinbase said the newly launched agent can also operate through ChatGPT and Claude using its MCP server.

“Coinbase for Agents is informed by insights gleaned from years of building the agentic economy, and the primary goal is to create agents that can transact. And unlike pure trading platforms, we’re the only one that combines exchange access with a native payments protocol. We’re aiming to build a fundamentally different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents,” said Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Product.

Interest in agentic payments continues to grow across the AI industry, driven by new partnerships and investments. Last month, Visa invested in Replit to help power agent-based payment capabilities for developers. This week, the payments giant also agreed with OpenAI to explore similar initiatives. The rapid pace of innovation in this area has drawn attention from regulators worldwide. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) recently stated that robust safeguards should be established to address and mitigate AI-related risks.