Brian Armstrong
He co-founded and runs Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, and spends most of his public commentary pushing the idea that crypto rails should carry everyd...
“We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. We want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well.”
No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · September 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
Yeah.
…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?
…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…
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…
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?
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