Coinbase (COIN) is preparing this week to let Coinbase Business customers accept USDC payments directly from AI agents, as part of a three-product rollout aimed at supporting transactions initiated by software rather than people.

The company says the new capability addresses missing infrastructure for an online economy in which autonomous software can discover services, create wallets, and pay merchants. Coinbase is pitching the update to businesses that want to make their products and services available to automated buyers. The launch also comes as AI agent activity has begun overtaking human traffic on some Coinbase developer pages.

Coinbase Business adds agent-ready checkout

The merchant-facing feature is built on x402, the payment standard Coinbase developed and incubated. Payments settle through Coinbase Payments, and Coinbase says merchants already using Coinbase Business do not need to add separate wiring or extra integrations to activate the function.

Transactions are made in USDC, settle instantly, and cannot be reversed. That design gives merchants a programmable payment rail for automated buyers, but it also means refunds, disputes, and reconciliation have to be handled through merchant-side processes rather than card-network chargebacks. Coinbase is also including reusable payment links and automated buyer data collection intended to help merchants with reconciliation.

Sid Coelho-Prabhu, who leads Coinbase Business, told CoinDesk that the product is designed to recreate a familiar commercial transaction for a new kind of customer. In a traditional transaction, he said, the buyer needs a card and a bank account, while the seller needs a bank account and a till.

“We are delivering that experience for the new online agentic economy,” Coelho-Prabhu said. In his description, an agent can read Coinbase’s developer documentation, create its own wallet, and arrive prepared to spend. A merchant’s full inventory can then be made available through a checkout flow designed for agents.

Another part of the rollout is Coinbase Developer Platform’s CDP x402 SDK. The software kit lets developers add agent payment acceptance to an API, an MCP server, or a web service in three lines of code. Coinbase describes the kit as its preconfigured version of the open-source x402 standard, combining payment infrastructure and suggested extensions that developers would otherwise need to assemble themselves.

Coinbase says early usage patterns support the timing of the launch. Last month, agent visits exceeded human visits to Base documentation pages for the first time, which the company cited as evidence that machines are increasingly appearing as users of online services. For developers and merchants, the practical test is whether those automated visits turn into authenticated requests, completed payments, and auditable records that existing business systems can use.

Coinbase expands plain-English agent trading tools

Coinbase has also expanded Coinbase for Agents, its Model Context Protocol product launched last month to connect AI assistants such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to user accounts.

Exchange customers now receive a real-time feed showing an agent’s open and active orders. The feed updates order status, price, and size in real time, allowing users to monitor each action as it occurs.

The product is intended to support hands-off conditional trading. A user can write an instruction in plain language, after which the agent monitors market data and acts according to the rule.

“Tell it what you want in plain English – ‘buy ETH if it dips 5%,’ ‘sell when my order fills’ – and it watches the market and executes for you,” Coinbase said. The agents use the same WebSocket market feed that Coinbase provides to institutional trading desks.

Coinbase launched the product on June 11 to allow AI assistants to trade crypto, retrieve market data, and pay for services through x402 within limits set by the user. At launch, Coinbase head of AI product Lincoln Murr said x402 had been developed together with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near. He said the protocol had processed 75 million transactions and $24 million in volume over 30 days, citing figures from a previous Cryptopolitan post.

Allowing an AI agent to trade and spend can increase exposure to attacks. Cryptopolitan reported that AI-powered exploits drained $600 million from DeFi protocols in April.

Coinbase’s approach is to separate agent portfolios from a user’s main balance and impose caps on spending, trade size, and the services an agent is permitted to access. Those controls are central to the rollout because the same automation that lets agents act quickly can also execute unintended or malicious instructions if account access, service permissions, or transaction limits are too broad.