{"id":16590,"date":"2026-04-25T13:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/16590\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T13:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:44:11","slug":"coinbases-jesse-pollak-says-ai-agents-are-the-next-big-wave-for-crypto-payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/16590\/","title":{"rendered":"Coinbase\u2019s Jesse Pollak says AI agents are the next big wave for crypto payments"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rapid rise of AI agents is beginning to reshape how payments happen online, and crypto infrastructure is emerging as a natural fit, according to Coinbase\u2019s Jesse Pollak.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was almost impossible nine months ago is now totally possible,\u201d Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the accelerating capabilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, one need is becoming clear: they require native ways to transact.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software,\u201d said Pollak, who will be speaking at Consensus Miami 2026<\/a> next month.<\/p>\n

That shift is fueling interest in so-called \u201cagentic payments,\u201d where AI systems can autonomously pay for services like data access, compute or travel bookings.<\/p>\n

Pollak said he hopes a key piece of that stack will be x402, an open-source payments protocol<\/a> that Coinbase and collaborators like Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard have been developing, which enables on-demand API payments without subscriptions or traditional billing systems.<\/p>\n

Instead of relying on legacy rails, blockchain-based payments allow agents to \u201cmake a single API call or smart contract call and move money globally, instantly, basically for free,\u201d Pollak said.<\/p>\n

Early traction is already visible. According to Pollak, roughly $48 million in payment volume has flowed through X402 so far, with about 95% of transactions occurring on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network founded by Pollak and incubated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also expanding quickly, with integrations spanning AI providers, data platforms and travel services that agents can tap into directly.<\/p>\n

Pollak said the long-term vision is to create an open marketplace of services that agents can access programmatically, without hitting paywalls or requiring human intervention. \u201cYou want agents to be able to run wild,\u201d he said, describing a system where software can seamlessly discover, purchase and use digital services in real time.<\/p>\n

While fully autonomous \u201czero-human\u201d businesses are beginning to emerge, Pollak said the bigger near-term shift will come from people augmenting themselves with AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe top performers are now using agents to become even more top performers,\u201d he said, describing workflows powered by multiple parallel AI systems.<\/p>\n

For crypto, the broader challenge remains adoption. Pollak argued the solution isn\u2019t better marketing, but invisibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll be a lot easier to sell crypto when you don\u2019t have to tell people about it, they just experience it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Read more: Coinbase\u2019s AI payments system joins Linux Foundation, gathers support from Google, Stripe, AWS and others<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rapid rise of AI agents is beginning to reshape how payments happen online, and crypto infrastructure is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,568,6318],"class_list":{"0":"post-16590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-ai-agents","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","10":"tag-coinbase","11":"tag-consensus-miami-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}