Coinbase for Agents Will Make Payments and Trade Crypto

Coinbase has launched Coinbase for Agents, a tool that allows AI agents to make payments, execute strategies, and trade crypto for users of the leading exchange.

Coinbase for Agents will connect users’ favorite agents like ChapGPT or Claude directly to their Coinbase account. Operating within limits they control, the agents can now do both financial reasoning and execution, Coinbase said.

The agent will operate within its own isolated portfolio, without visibility or access into other holdings. Or, it can simply use your main Coinbase account. Coinbase for Agents will only be able to touch what you’ve given it specific permission to do.

Soon, users will be able to set exact rules like maximum trade size, what it can interact with, and how much it can spend.

“Think of it like giving a gift card rather than handing over your bank account,” Coinbase said. “You define the limits. Your agent executes within them.”

Compliance is also built in, using the same transaction monitoring and know your transaction (KYT) checks that Coinbase uses.

Coinbase for Agents has crypto spot and derivatives trading enabled now, with trading stock and index funds, prediction markets, and commodities coming.

Agents will be able to buy premium data and services such as proprietary data to better inform trading decisions. It will soon be x402-enabled, allowing agents to seamlessly pay for anything from compute and statistics to images and services.

“Imagine you want to dollar-cost average into ETH at the optimal time of day,” Coinbase said. “Just tell your agent your target and timeframe. It can pull 30 days of hourly price data to identify when ETH historically trades lowest, set a recurring $20 market buy at that time, and schedule it to run daily for the next two weeks. Set it and forget it.”

Coinbase has also built what it describes as a powerful agent directly into the Coinbase app. Coinbase Advisor is a Securities and Exchange Commission- and Commodity Futures Trading Commission-registered financial advisor that can give guidance on trades.

Coinbase is not alone. In April, the Gemini exchange launched agentic trading tools, saying “whether you’re a developer building a custom strategy from scratch or a trader who wants to plug in an AI agent and get started, you can now connect to Gemini… to use Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI to automate your trading in a way that’s as simple or as powerful as you need it to be.”