Coinbase’s new tool can help agents trade and pay for premium research

As AI agent traffic exceeds human Internet traffic, companies in commerce and finance are building tools that allow agents to take actions on behalf of users at a rapid pace. Days after trading platform Robinhood introduced agents who can trade on behalf of users, Coinbase has launched its own agents who can execute trades and pay for premium research.

Users can integrate the proxy with their main accounts and start trading, the company said on Thursday. If users don’t want to give the agent access to their main account, they can choose to run it in a separate sandbox.

Coinbase noted that a dealer can use tools like Coinbase Advanced, the company’s platform for professional traders that includes additional features like TradingView charts to analyze and execute trades. Users can ask an agent to rebalance their portfolio, ask them to pursue an investment thesis and trade on their behalf, or provide advice on a one-time cryptocurrency trade.

Currently, the agent can trade on spot crypto markets and derivatives, with support for stocks and prediction markets planned for the future. Coinbase added that it will soon add support for custom limits such as the maximum trade size, the services an agent can interact with, and the amount they can spend.

Coinbase is leveraging the x402 open payment protocol that it launched in collaboration with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near last year. Using this standard, an agent can pay for premium research data APIs and on-demand computing for trading insights without the need for a login or subscription. This website lists the services that the proxy can access through the x402 protocol.

The trading platform has been actively investing in AI tools over the past few years. It launched AgentKit, which allows developers to integrate automated wallets into their apps, in 2024. Last December, it added an AI-powered assistant to the app that offers trading tips and financial advice. The company said the latest version of the agent can also run in ChatGPT or Cloude through its MCP server.

“Coinbase for Agents leverages insights from years of building the agent economy, and the primary goal is to create agents who can transact. Unlike pure trading platforms, we are the only ones that combine exchange access with a native payments protocol. We aim to build a completely different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents,” Lincoln Moore, head of AI product, told TechCrunch via email.

AI companies are exploring agent payments at a rapid pace through new partnerships. Last month, Visa invested in Replit to support agent payments to developers. The payment network company struck a deal with OpenAI this week to explore similar products. The pace of development in this sector has made global financial regulators take notice. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) said there must be strong safeguards to mitigate AI risks.