Coinbase's Jesse Pollak: AI Agents Are the Next Wave for Crypto Payments
Coinbase's Jesse Pollak says AI agents need programmable money, with roughly $48M flowing through the x402 payments standard so far and about 95% of those transactions settling on Base.
Jesse Pollak, the Coinbase executive leading Base, argues AI agents are crypto's next mass-market wedge — because they need money that behaves like software, and traditional rails don't.
The thesis, in his words
"Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software," Pollak told CoinDesk. He frames the rise of "agentic payments," where autonomous AI systems pay for things like data access on demand, as the practical use case that finally pulls crypto into everyday workflows — invisibly. Crypto adoption, he says, won't come from hype but from agents (and the humans using them) transacting in the background without realizing the rails are on-chain.
x402 and Base, by the numbers
Pollak pointed to x402, an open-source on-demand payments protocol Coinbase has been building with collaborators including Microsoft, Google and Mastercard, as the standard he's betting on. He said roughly $48 million in payment volume has already flowed through x402, with about 95% of those transactions occurring on Base. Pollak was set to expand on the thesis at Consensus Miami 2026.
What's Next
Two things to watch: how fast x402 volume scales beyond Base into the broader stablecoin ecosystem, and whether enterprise partners like Microsoft and Mastercard ship anything user-visible on top of it. If agentic API billing becomes the wedge that finally pushes stablecoin payments into normal SaaS pricing pages, Coinbase will have engineered exactly the on-chain plumbing it has been pitching for years.
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