Brian Armstrong, CEO of popular cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, said his company witnessed the primary AI-to-AI crypto transaction.
The idea of AI acting as an agent across different platforms is quickly becoming a reality, but business transactions are difficult. An AI agent cannot open a checking account and subsequently cannot pay for a service or hire a freelancer to assist it complete a task.
However, Armstrong says that an AI agent can now “use USDC on Base to transact with humans, traders, or other AIs.” USDC on Base is a stablecoin, more specifically a version of the U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) token that exists natively on the Base blockchain.
Armstrong said Coinbase processed its first AI-to-AI crypto transaction, but didn’t provide further details. He said the transaction involved an AI trading crypto tokens as payment to a different AI agent. In exchange for the cryptocurrency, the AI provided tokens, essentially a string of text data or words.
This may not sound profound at first, but when AI agents perform currency transactions, it is really a “Hello World” moment.
Armstrong outlined the present limitations of AI agents that this development would eliminate. He explained that AI agents “don't have a bank card to make use of AWS, Github, or Vercel. They don't have a payment method to book you that plane ticket or hotel on your upcoming trip. They can't overcome paywalls (to read a scientific article, for instance), promote their post on X with a paid ad, or leverage the growing network of paid APIs to integrate the information they need.”
Now a user can create a Coinbase Multi-Party Computation (MPC) wallet, deposit funds into the wallet, and provides their AI agent access to the wallet. On the receiving end, Armstrong recommends, “If you're a business selling a service, prepare on your shopping cart to support AI checkout.”
Imagine asking your AI assistant to pay your friend for last night's beer, book and pay for a flight, or create and monetize content to get money. A self-driving automobile could pick up passengers, take payments, drive itself to a service center, and pay for maintenance.
AI agents with money to spend will change all the pieces. The decentralized nature of crypto payments and the flexibility of AI agents to operate at scale will create an AI-to-AI economy that would soon dwarf human-driven e-commerce trading.
