The rapid rise of artificial intelligence agents is beginning to reshape the way online payments are made, and crypto infrastructure is emerging as a natural fit, according to Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak.
“What was nearly impossible nine months ago is now entirely possible,” Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the acceleration capabilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, one need becomes clear: they require native ways to transact.
“Agents define themselves in software and operational software, they want money as software,” said Pollak, who will speak at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
That change is fueling interest in so-called “agent payments,” where artificial intelligence systems can autonomously pay for services such as data access, computing or travel reservations.
Pollak said he expects a key piece of that stack to be x402, an open source payments protocol that Coinbase and collaborators like Microsoft, Google and Mastercard have been developing, which enables on-demand API payments without subscriptions or traditional billing systems.
Instead of relying on legacy rails, blockchain-based payments allow agents to “make a single API call or a smart contract call and move money globally, instantly, basically for free,” Pollak said.
The initial traction is already visible. According to Pollak, approximately $48 million in payment volume has flowed through X402 so far, with approximately 95% of transactions occurring on Base, the Ethereum layer 2 network founded by Pollak and incubated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also expanding rapidly, with integrations spanning AI providers, data platforms and travel services that agents can leverage directly.
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. “What you want is for agents to be able to act freely,” he said, describing a system where software can discover, buy and use digital services seamlessly and in real time.
While fully autonomous “human-less” companies are starting to emerge, Pollak said the biggest near-term change will come from people being empowered by AI.
“Top-performing companies are now using agents to become even better performers,” he said, describing workflows powered by multiple parallel AI systems.
For cryptocurrencies, the broader challenge remains adoption. Pollak argued that the solution is not better marketing, but invisibility.
“It will be much easier to sell cryptocurrency when you don’t have to tell people about it, they just experience it,” he said.
Read more: Coinbase AI Payments System Joins Linux Foundation, Gets Support from Google, Stripe, AWS, and Others
