The rapid rise of AI agents is beginning to reshape how payments are made online, and crypto infrastructure is emerging as a natural fit, according to Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak.
“What was almost impossible nine months ago is now completely possible,” Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the accelerating possibilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, a need is becoming clear: they require native ways of acting.
“Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software,” said Pollak, who will speak at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
That shift is fueling interest in so-called “agent payments”, where AI systems can independently pay for services such as data access, data processing or travel bookings.
Pollak said he hopes a key part of that stack will be x402, an open-source payment protocol developed by Coinbase and partners like Microsoft, Google and Mastercard that 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 smart contract call and move money globally, instantly, virtually for free,” Pollak said.
Early traction is already visible. According to Pollak, about $48 million in payment volume has flowed through X402 so far, with about 95% of transactions taking place on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network founded by Pollak and incubated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also rapidly expanding with integrations spanning AI providers, data platforms and travel services that agents can tap into 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. “You want agents to be able to run wild,” he said, describing a system where software can seamlessly discover, purchase and use digital services in real time.
While fully autonomous “zero-human” companies are starting to emerge, Pollak said the bigger shift in the near term will come from people augmenting themselves with AI.
“Top performers are now using agents to become even more top performers,” he said, describing workflows powered by multiple parallel AI systems.
For crypto, the broader challenge remains adoption. Pollak argued that the solution is not better marketing, but invisibility.
“It will be much easier to sell crypto when you don’t have to tell people about it, they just experience it,” he said.
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