Armstrong was walking Elad Gil through Coinbase's three current bets — the everything exchange, stablecoin payments, and agentic finance — when he got to AI agents holding accounts of their own. He means it literally: the company ships a prompt you paste into an agent to give it a self-custodial wallet. His reasoning is that an agent has no government ID and cannot walk into a branch, so crypto rails are the only ones open to it.
Yeah.
And maybe we start with Coinbase. So, Coinbase has been making some really big moves. You've been floating this concept of the everything exchange as you've been building out what I think is a new global payments layer. Can you tell us, you know, at a high level, what are some of the directions of the company and some of the areas you're most excited about right now?
Yeah, so we're at a really exciting time in Coinbase's history because, on the one hand, every asset class is coming on chain. It's now possible to trade everything in one place with good liquidity and good cross-margin. And so, for markets and trading and that out there, stocks and commodities and crypto and derivatives, perpetual futures, like it's all coming to one place where traders can do everything in one spot, including prediction markets too. And they can do that in more countries now, given the regulatory clarity that's emerging, which we can talk about if you want. So, the everything exchanges is kind of our bread and butter at our core business. The next big area that's emerging is stablecoin payments, which have just been growing like crazy. Even when Bitcoin prices are down, stablecoin payments just keep growing. And so, we're helping companies all over the world integrate stablecoin payments, which are fast and cheap and global. You can send money at the speed of information, right? It's kind of like under one second, under one cent US to move money anywhere in the world. And then, the third big one is something I know you talk a lot about on this podcast, which is how is AI changing? Because AI is changing everything. And so, it's obviously going to change financial services too. And so, we've we call this Agentic Finance or AIFI. And we're building this into Coinbase in a number of different ways. The first way is that people who have their existing financial account, they're going to want to have an AI advisor, kind of like wealthy people are able to get access to these investment advisors. But everybody should have access to them now and they can help teach you about building the right portfolio and dollar cost averaging, tax loss harvesting, and all these kind of things. And, you know, if the market dips five or 10 or 15%, leg into this kind of portfolio over time and try to save money on fees and earn yield while it's sitting in cash. And you can just talk to it like a human and it'll do all these things, all these things for you. At least that's the vision. And it's getting better and better. So, we've launched an advisor in the Coinbase product. The next thing is that the AI agents themselves are going to have to have their own accounts. And so, we're on a mission to kind of like go out there. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. We want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. And so, we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt, you paste it into your AI agent, it can now have its own financial account. And it's using a self-custodial wallet in crypto rails. So, there's no, there's not like a KYC process. You don't like our AI agents don't have a government ID. They can't walk into like a bank branch, at least not yet, without their humanoid robots companion. Um, and so now any AI agent can have its own financial account to do payments to pay for pay for goods.
And is that tied to a account of somebody who's already on Coinbase? In other words, is this sort of like a subsidiary account? Is it an entirely new thing? Like, how do you think about the hierarchy of that?
Yeah, so we're doing it both ways, actually, just because I think there's going to be demand for both use cases. So, there's going to be possible to create a separate Agentic account. Segregated funds on Coinbase in the near future, and you can give your agent access to just that to do trading and payments on your behalf. That's kind of linked to your identity as a human. We're also going to provide self-custodial wallets to any AI agent out there that wants to hold a balance in stablecoin or event. It could actually raise money. It could, you know, issue a token. And so, what's fascinating is that today we often talk to these agents and it's sort of like one person to one agent and they go get some work done, but they often get stuck. They get stuck. There's like, oh, here's a paywall. Can you put in your credit card? I need to spin up these AWS resources. Or, you know, you wanted me to book this hotel for you, but here's the web page. Can you go put in your credit card? That kind of thing. And in the future, I think you're going to want to have these agents have their own spend accounts, kind of like having a personal assistant or an employee who has their own spend account. It's going to need probably like a stablecoin-backed credit card for backward compatibility. But we're seeing a lot of Agentic payment now flow over these new protocols like X402, which is one that we incubated at Coinbase that we actually put into the Linux Foundation. So Google and Cloudflare and AWS, a bunch of people are working with us on that now. And so that's been really cool. And we put together like this little fun website called agentic.market where people can go see the stats of how many payments are flowing in this new economy and see all the different services. So we're helping a lot of businesses get enabled into the Agentic economy. Like, you know, is your store ready to accept agents as customers? We can, we're, you know, we have a product called Coinbase Business that helps companies accept stablecoin payments. And that's good for humans who want to pay with stablecoin payments, but it's also good for agents. And they kind of get both out of the box.
You mentioned things like stablecoin or crypto-backed credit cards. How do you think about what proportion of the future volume in the Agentic future is going to be crypto versus more standardized finance rails?