Coinbase Launches Tool for AI Agents to Trade Crypto

Coinbase has launched a tool that allows artificial intelligence agents to make payments and trade crypto on behalf of users.

Coinbase for Agents enables autonomous trading and payments. The tool lets users of the crypto exchange manage their holdings without constant manual oversight. AI models like ChatGPT and Claude can connect with a user’s exchange account and be prompted to make trades or execute strategies.

AI agents can also make payments using Coinbase’s AI payments protocol x402. This allows the bots to pay for data services to gather information for carrying out trading strategies without human intervention. The tool is available via both a model context protocol allowing AI models to connect with a user account and a command-line interface for developers.

Coinbase Advisor provides registered financial guidance. The company introduced Coinbase Advisor, an AI agent integrated into its app. It is a US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission-registered financial adviser that can give guidance on trades.

The tool could help users manage their crypto without the constant manual oversight. It can undertake tasks like allocating funds to reward programs or making recurring buys. Coinbase gave an example of instructing an agent to dollar-cost average into ETH at the optimal time of day by pulling 30 days of hourly price data to identify when ETH historically trades lowest, setting a recurring $20 market buy at that time, and scheduling it to run daily for the next two weeks.

Study highlights risks with AI agent performance. A study published on June 10 found that users of AI agents are losing money. Researchers at Pantera Capital, Stanford University, Ava Labs and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts studied over 925,000 token holders and found that agent treasuries made gains of $30 million on paper while their token holders collectively lost $191.7 million.

The study also found that many of the projects it studied do not yet provide clear evidence of autonomous trade execution with a substantial share of projects being basic API integrations.

Crypto firms expand AI agent capabilities. Coinbase is the latest to bet that AI agents will interact with and transact across multiple services. Stablecoin issuer Circle last month launched tools letting AI agents use wallets, discover services and make programmable payments with its token. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has predicted that billions of AI agents will use stablecoins within five years.

Earlier this month, the stablecoin and wallet infrastructure provider Crossmint launched a service that enabled AI agents to make payments using eligible Visa credit and debit cards. Crypto investment firm Keyrock said in a report in May that AI agents had quickly created a developed ecosystem and had settled $73 million across 176 million transactions between May 2025 and April 2026.