Coinbase CEO reveals first AI-to-AI crypto transaction

Brian Armstrong, CEO of popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, says his company witnessed the first AI-to-AI crypto transaction.

The idea of AI acting as an agent across platforms is fast becoming a reality, but commercial transactions have been challenging. An AI agent can’t get a bank account so it can’t pay for a service or hire a freelancer to help it complete a task.

However, Armstrong says that an AI agent can now “use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants, or other AIs.” USDC on Base is a stablecoin, specifically a version of the US Dollar Coin (USDC) token that exists natively on the Base blockchain.

Armstrong said that Coinbase processed its first AI-to-AI crypto transaction but didn’t offer much more detail. He said the transaction saw one AI trade crypto tokens as payment to a different AI agent. In exchange for the crypto, the AI provided tokens, basically a string of text data or words.

It may not sound profound at first, but this is really a “hello world” moment to have AI agents transacting with currency.

Armstrong explained the current limitations of AI agents that this development would remove. He explained that AI agents “don’t have a credit card to use AWS, Github, or Vercel. They don’t have a payment method to book you the plane ticket or hotel for your upcoming trip. They can’t get through paywalls (for instance to read a scientific article), promote their post on X with a paid ad, or use the growing network of paid APIs to integrate data they need.”

Now, a user can create a Coinbase Multi-Party Computation (MPC) wallet, add funds to the wallet, and give their AI agent access to the wallet. On the receiving side, Armstrong recommends that “if you are a company that sells a service – get ready for your shopping cart to be AI checkout enabled.”

Imagine asking your AI assistant to pay your friend for last night’s beers, book and pay for a flight, or create and monetize content to receive funds. A self-driving car could pick up passengers, receive payments, take itself to a service center, and pay for maintenance.

AI agents with money to spend will change everything. The decentralized nature of crypto payments and the ability of AI agents to operate at scale will create an AI-to-AI economy that could soon eclipse human-driven e-commerce trade.

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