Crypto exchange Coinbase has introduced “Agentic Wallets,” a new wallet infrastructure designed to give AI agents the ability to spend, earn and trade autonomously.

The company argues that while AI agents have become increasingly capable — answering questions, summarising documents and assisting with tasks — they “hit a wall when they need to actually do something that requires money.”

Agents today can recommend trades but cannot execute them. They can identify APIs they need but cannot pay for access. Financial actions still require human approval.

Agentic Wallets aim to remove that bottleneck.

From Advising to Acting

According to Coinbase, the industry is shifting from interactive AI systems to autonomous ones.

“The next generation of agents won’t just advise — they’ll act,” the company said in a blog post. “We’re moving from AI agents that advise to agents that act. From assistants that suggest to helpers that execute.”

The premise is that agents require the ability to hold and manage funds independently using crypto rails that enable programmable, instant transactions.

Agentic Wallets are positioned as purpose-built infrastructure for that transition, combining autonomous financial capability with enterprise-grade security and programmable guardrails.

Key Features

Coinbase says the product differs from standard embedded wallets by being designed specifically for machine-driven financial operations.

Built-In Agent Skills

Onchain complexity is abstracted into plug-and-play “skills,” including Authenticate, Fund, Send, Trade and Earn. Developers can integrate these capabilities without building transaction logic from scratch.

x402 Payments Protocol

At the core of the system is x402, a payments protocol designed for machine-to-machine transactions. Coinbase says the protocol has already processed more than 50 million transactions and supports API paywalls and programmatic resource access without human intervention.

Gasless Trading on Base

Agents can trade gaslessly on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, reducing the risk of stalled operations due to insufficient network fees.

Command Line Deployment

A dedicated CLI tool — “npx awal” — allows developers to spin up wallets, fund them and deploy financial skills in minutes.

Security Guardrails

The system includes programmable spending controls such as session caps and per-transaction limits. Private keys remain within Coinbase’s secure infrastructure and are not exposed to the agent’s prompt or underlying large language model.

Built-in Know Your Transaction (KYT) screening is designed to block high-risk interactions automatically.

Enabling the ‘Machine Economy’

Coinbase says enabling agents to hold and manage funds opens up new categories of applications, including:

• Autonomous DeFi: Agents that monitor yields and rebalance liquidity positions automatically.

• Machine-to-machine commerce: Agents paying for compute, APIs, storage or data streams without human oversight.

• Agentic commerce: Agents participating in creator economies or monetising their own outputs.

• Multi-chain operations: Agents executing strategies across networks where opportunities arise.

Behind the scenes, Agentic Wallets integrate with Coinbase’s developer platform and operate through non-custodial wallets secured in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

Building Infrastructure for Autonomous Systems

“Agentic Wallets provide the fundamental infrastructure for this transition — giving agents the financial capabilities they need to operate autonomously while maintaining the security and trust that enterprises require,” the company said.

With the launch, Coinbase is making a broader bet that the next wave of crypto adoption may come not from retail users — but from autonomous software agents transacting with each other.