Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong describes plans to give AI agents their own bank accounts on Base, a blockchain protocol. The strategy has three parts: connecting AI models like ChatGPT to user accounts for trading, embedding portfolio management tools in Coinbase, and creating self-custodial wallets for agents that need no identity verification.
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Brian, in the future, I'm curious, do you think Coinbase might be known as payment rails for AIs rather than exchange for humans?
Yeah, so that's definitely part of our strategy is to become the financial account for AI. At the beginning of this year, we sat down and, and we're thinking about this a bit, like, what are all the ways that AI agents might interface with people's financial accounts, right? So I kind of broke it down into 3. The first one is that everyone's, everyone's using these LLMs, right? Like, ChatGPT and Claude, they're asking a lot of financial questions to those LLMs, but the LLMs don't have context about what's in their financial account, their portfolio, and they don't have the ability to make changes in there or make trades, for instance. So the first thing that's going to happen, I think, is people are just going to use LLMs to connect to their Coinbase account, which we now have the ability for people to do that. And then step 2 is a lot of people are going to want to just have something like this right in, right inside the Coinbase account. And it can kind of help you with things like rebalance my portfolio, you know, tax loss harvesting. And then the third part is kind of what you're referencing interesting here, which is I don't want to just use AI to control my own existing Brian's financial account. Every AI agent's going to have its own financial account and it has to be able to sign up for that. An AI agent doesn't have a piece of paper issued by the government with your photo on it or something. How are they going to go sign up for these accounts? And so that's where we created, with our base protocol, we have a self-custodial wallet that any AI agent can sign up for instantly with no KYC and they can have their own self-custodial wallet. And that's what they're using to then transact right now in these, um, agent payments that are starting to scale up.
