One year after its official launch, Coinbase Business is opening up a new lane in its payments platform, one built not for human customers but for AI agents. The exchange announced July 23 that all business clients can now accept payments from AI bots through a stack powered by Coinbase Payments and the x402 open internet payments standard.Coinbase Business head Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu described the mechanics as a parallel channel running alongside the existing human payments flow. A merchant already set up to sell goods or services through Coinbase Business does not need additional configuration to receive agent payments. Bots connect, communicate in machine-readable language, complete the transaction, and exit without human intervention in between.The unit was formally launched in June 2025. In its first year, Coinbase Business signed up approximately 5,000 customers, processed roughly $1 billion in combined payments and trading volume, and expanded to about 12 employees. Coelho-Prabhu, who spent almost nine years at Coinbase and previously led the Coinbase Wallet team before it was rebranded as the Base App, called this his second major zero-to-one product at the company.<h2 id="early-adopters-and-a-growing-volume-signal">Early Adopters and a Growing Volume Signal</h2>The first businesses using the agentic payment system have come from digital infrastructure. Bots have been purchasing Open Router credits, domain names, and cloud storage from Amazon and Google. Coelho-Prabhu said these early categories reflect where AI agents are most active today, and pointed to broader consumer commerce as the next phase.A data point published alongside the announcement offered a signal of rising bot activity. Starting in June, around 53% of web traffic to the Base blockchain's documentation was generated by agentic visitors, according to a Coinbase spokesperson. Coelho-Prabhu said that figure points to an ecosystem where agents are already discovering, evaluating, and paying for services independently.The x402 protocol underpins the full transaction cycle. An agent discovers Coinbase's developer documentation, spins up a wallet, receives funding, pays a merchant enrolled in Coinbase Business, and settles on Base or another supported chain in USD Coin (USDC). Coelho-Prabhu said Coinbase now has that complete end-to-end pipeline in place after years of building each component separately.Related Article: <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/ark-adds-coinbase-circle-shares-as-stocks-rise" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Ark Adds Coinbase, Circle Shares as Stocks Rise</a><h2 id="coinbase-expands-its-broader-ai-toolset">Coinbase Expands Its Broader AI Toolset</h2>The agentic payments rollout is part of a wider push across Coinbase's platform. Also announced July 23 was Coinbase for Agents, which allows users to connect their own AI configurations to their trading and investment workflows. A software development kit released alongside it is designed to make it easier for third-party developers to add x402 payment support to external services.Coinbase had previously announced Coinbase Advisor, a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered AI system that delivers personalized investment advice to users. Coelho-Prabhu said the company saw the trajectory of agentic commerce two or three years ago and began investing early. He described the current moment as the start of an "explosion" in AI-driven transactions moving beyond infrastructure into mainstream commerce.

Coinbase Launches Agent Payment Stack on 1-Year Business Unit Anniversary

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