Coinbase exec Jesse Pollak says the next big wave in crypto payments is coming from autonomous AI agents — and crypto infrastructure is positioned to be their native money.
“What was almost impossible nine months ago is now totally possible,” Pollak told CoinDesk, pointing to rapid advances in agentic AI systems that can act on users’ behalf. Those systems don’t just need data and compute; they need a native way to transact. “Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software,” he said. Pollak will expand on these ideas at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
The shift is already spawning so-called “agentic payments,” where AI can autonomously pay for services like data access, compute cycles or travel bookings. Pollak highlighted x402 — an open-source payments protocol Coinbase and collaborators including Microsoft, Google and Mastercard are building — as a core piece of that stack. x402 aims to enable on-demand API payments without subscriptions or legacy billing systems, letting software make single API or smart-contract calls to move money globally and almost instantly.
There’s early traction. Pollak said roughly $48 million in payment volume has flowed through x402 so far, with roughly 95% of those transactions occurring on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network he helped found and that Coinbase incubated. The ecosystem is growing fast, with integrations connecting AI providers, data platforms and travel services that agents can access programmatically.
Pollak outlined a long-term vision of an open marketplace of services that agents can discover, purchase and use in real time — no human intervention and no paywalls. “You want agents to be able to run wild,” he said, describing a future where software can seamlessly discover and buy digital services.
He also noted a near-term human angle: rather than replacing people immediately, agents are already amplifying top performers. “The top performers are now using agents to become even more top performers,” Pollak said, describing workflows powered by multiple parallel AI systems.
For crypto’s broader adoption challenge, Pollak argued the key is invisibility rather than louder marketing: users will embrace crypto more easily when they don’t have to think about it — they just experience it. In that scenario, blockchain-native payments quietly power autonomous agents and human-augmented workflows alike, potentially unlocking new business models and revenue streams across AI, data and services.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
