Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is framing artificial intelligence as a tailwind for crypto rather than a competing trend, pointing to new data showing that automated payments between software agents on the Base network have crossed 100 million transactions.
The milestone was reached in June 2026, roughly nine months after the underlying payment activity began scaling on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network Coinbase launched in 2023.
Armstrong's Case for 'Agentic Finance'
Armstrong argues that as AI agents increasingly transact on their own, they will need a native way to move money, and that crypto rails are better suited to that job than legacy payment systems.
AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important.
How the Payments Actually Work
The transactions Armstrong is citing run through x402, a protocol built on top of the long-dormant HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code, which was introduced two years after Base's launch to let software applications settle small payments automatically without human intervention. Those payments are denominated in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin launched in 2018 by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium.
According to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, wallets used for this kind of agentic payment activity tend to hold smaller balances, carry a wider variety of asset types, and be newer than the average Base wallet. Notably, 95% of the total transaction value moved through this activity came from individual transactions worth at least $1, suggesting the volume is being driven by a large number of small, real payments rather than a handful of large ones.
Context: Coinbase's Upcoming Earnings
Armstrong's comments arrive ahead of Coinbase's next earnings report, where analysts are on average forecasting Q2 revenue of $1.29 billion, a roughly 13.8% year-over-year decline, with earnings per share expected to be roughly flat. Highlighting Base's growth in AI-driven payment volume gives Coinbase a growth narrative to point to even as its core trading revenue faces pressure.
