Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has pushed back against calls for the crypto industry to shift its focus toward artificial intelligence, arguing instead that AI agents will increase demand for crypto-based financial services.

In a Sunday post on X, Armstrong promoted the concept of agentic finance, or AiFi, pointing to Coinbase’s Base network, USDC and x402 as infrastructure for autonomous machine-to-machine payments. “AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto,” Armstrong wrote, saying AI agents will need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails. “If anything, it makes crypto more important,” he added.

The comments come as crypto companies increasingly present blockchain networks as payment infrastructure for AI agents. Agentic payment activity on Base topped 100 million transactions in June, according to Chainalysis, highlighting one of the clearest areas where crypto firms are trying to connect AI software with onchain settlement.

Coinbase’s AiFi stack

Armstrong’s AiFi thesis is based on the view 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 intended to make onchain applications faster and cheaper to use. The network was developed as general-purpose blockchain infrastructure, not specifically for AI payments.

Two years later, Coinbase introduced x402, a payment protocol built around the HTTP “402 Payment Required” standard. The protocol enables automated stablecoin payments between software applications, allowing AI agents and other autonomous systems to pay for digital resources such as APIs and data without traditional accounts or manual checkout processes.

USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin launched by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium in 2018, is one of the assets used for x402 payments, enabling software agents to conduct automated transactions. Stablecoins are commonly used in crypto payment systems because they are designed to maintain a stable value relative to fiat currencies while remaining transferable on blockchain networks.

Together, Base, x402 and USDC form the core of Coinbase’s current approach to infrastructure for agentic payments.

Coinbase is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on Thursday. Analysts’ average estimate is for revenue of $1.29 billion, with sales projected to decline 13.8% from the comparable period last year, according to Yahoo Finance data. Earnings per share are expected to be flat.

Base agentic activity exceeds 100 million transactions

Chainalysis reported in June that agentic payments on Base via x402 had surpassed 100 million transactions within roughly nine months of activity.

The analytics firm said it tracked the activity by identifying x402-related payment flows onchain. Transactions worth at least $1 accounted for 95% of the total value transferred, according to the report.

Chainalysis also found that wallets involved in agentic payments were typically newer, held more types of assets and had smaller balances than the average Base user. Those characteristics make the reported activity relevant beyond raw transaction counts, because they indicate how agentic payment users differ from broader Base activity, while leaving open questions about repeat usage, transaction sizes and the methodology used to classify payments as agentic.

Cointelegraph said it asked Chainalysis for updated x402 activity figures and details about its tracking methodology, but the firm had not responded by publication time.