Alexander Lorenzo explains how AI agents paired with blockchain payments on Coinbase's Base chain could automate purchases and negotiations, potentially saving consumers 30% by enabling low-fee microtransactions and changing how pricing works.
You are now living in a world where AI agents are going to be purchasing things on your behalf. If you want an item, you can get it for 30% cheaper because that AI agent can go through every listing of that item and find the cheapest one known to man. Not only could it do that, but it could place bids on your behalf. It can negotiate with people on your behalf. We are now living in the world of AI agent marketplace. It is already happening, and it's the biggest use case for AI agents that we have seen, where real transactional, real value is happening, real dollars, because Right now with Claude, with OpenAI, yes, all of it's great. I use the heck out of it. I use it every day, a whole bunch of tokens spent. But the problem is all words, video, and image, just like the internet was before crypto came out. I don't know if you noticed this, but the entirety of the internet is just words, image, and video. They're just aggregated and changed and organized in different ways. Instagram is the same thing as Twitter, just organized in a different way until blockchain came out. And so AI has been in this same realm for a long time. And when X402 payments came out with specifically Coinbase's Base chain, this is where the entire AI landscape completely changed. Now real monetary value can be transferred across the internet like Bitcoin, right? Before, money was just paper. When Bitcoin came out, now you can transfer $5 billion for a $15 fee. You can't do that before Bitcoin. And this is like there's famous transactions where there's, you know, a whole bunch of Bitcoin being transferred for like $15. That same leap is happening with the AI agent world. It's the biggest one. It's bigger than Claude itself. It's bigger than any of the research things that Claude could do because it's only text, image, and video. And we know this is true because Visa, MasterCard, and many other places are adopting it in their actual credit and debit cards. Listen to what I'm saying. Imagine a world where you could go and save 30% on all your purchases simply because the AI agent is finding the cheapest price. Do you realize what that means? That means that people are truly gonna have to be competitive. That also means that dropping the price on your item to compete with people is no longer a thing. It just gets bought up. If you wanna clear your inventory, all you have to do is drop your price by 20% and all the AI agents will identify that yours is the cheapest and clear your inventory. This gives more stability. Microtransactions. So if you wanna charge a penny for your service, you can charge a penny for your service now. You don't have to charge $10 because before you had to do this because there's a 31-cent fee on every transaction with Visa and MasterCard. Now through AI agents and blockchain specifically, you could charge $0.10 for your service and the AI agent will spend only half a penny, a quarter of a penny to make that transaction happen. Imagine a world where the AI agent knows what you buy for your groceries and automatically buys it biweekly, but asks for your confirmation before it buys it. Hey, do you have yogurt in your refrigerator? Greek yogurt? Is there any left? And you say yes, and then it doesn't buy it. But just imagine this world. Think about all that time. We're talking about money here. You could save 30% on your all of your bills, great. You know, you could do half-cent transactions, but think about all the times you spent clicking the buy button, like on things that you don't like. You just like paper towels. Like who, like, why are we focusing on paper towels? Right? Why are we focusing on paper? Like we can send the bot to do that, man. The world is changing right in front of your eyes. It's time to get with it or get left behind.
