# Coinbase's AI-Driven Agentic Finance Strategy

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-07

## Transcript

through the sort of broader vision that Coinbase has around the everything exchange, I think we're able to offer a much more coherent and competent set of products than competitors.
Coinbase has been a major leader for the digital asset industry for a long time, but how are they dealing with the rise of AI?
What does agentic trading mean?
What can you do on Coinbase with AI today?
And what does all this mean for investors?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that the man who launched Coinbase's base chain said that this year in crypto has felt like getting punched in the face and...
Just like, yeah, bro, yeah.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Thursday, August 6th.
We will be releasing this episode tomorrow on August 7th, and today we are joined by Lincoln Muir.
Lincoln is the AI product lead at Coinbase, where he leads initiatives in the intersection of artificial intelligence, blockchain, including X402, which we will talk about, Coinbase agents, and the new SEC-registered Coinbase advisor tool.
Lincoln is going to give us a ton of alpha about AI agents, Coinbase, crypto, and all things related to all of these things.
So that sounds good to you.
Make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
As a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful sponsors at Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization.
So keep an ear out for more information about them later in the episode.
But for now, let's bring in Lincoln.
Welcome to the Milk Road Show.
How are you?
Thank you for having me.
Doing well.
I'm really glad you're here.
I wanted to start with Jesse Pollack's comments because it just feels like something that really resonates for its honesty and authenticity.
This year in crypto has kind of felt like a punch in the face.
What are your thoughts on this comment and what do you think that crypto and base specifically can do to start punching back?
Yeah, I totally agree.
I've been in the crypto space now for about a decade, and it's a very weird time.
There's a dichotomy between the institutionalization and legitimization and adoption that we've seen that is counterbalanced with the lack of excitement, both in terms of developers building cool, new, exciting consumer-facing opportunities, and just a general sort of consolidation of the space.
It feels like in some sense, we've never seen more use cases of crypto and more users.
But we haven't seen token prices go up in the way that everyone would hope.
And now we're having to come to terms with the fact that there's a new big boy in town.
His name is AI and he's sucking up all the liquidity.
So we can keep building and that's great.
But at some point, things are going to have to come around in the favor of crypto, which I totally think will happen.
And in terms of what Base can do and what Coinbase can do to help make that a reality, the biggest opportunity I see is around being a part of this growing movement to institutionalize crypto, make it available to a mass consumer audience.
build in the features and components that enable frictionless use of wallets and technology that gives everyone crypto rails to interact on, even if they don't realize it, even if it's invisible behind the scenes.
What new direction would you like to see from base to sort of begin that punching back effort?
You know, I mean, like, I think Jesse has some ideas about this.
There's clearly a lot that's going on at Coinbase right now.
New things being built, new products coming out.
But what would you personally like to see in terms of that new direction?
I think there's a lot of implications around the sort of proliferation in chains that we've been seeing recently and how the app layer and the infrastructure layer, not just including chains, but also wallets, is starting to manifest.
And I think Base has a very compelling opportunity to keep its status as the number one L2 by improving what their core competency is, which is scaling, which is driving liquidity, using the Coinbase name brand and distribution of having 100 million consumers to provide product experiences that are, while not necessarily novel for the sake of what's possible and pushing the frontiers of crypto.
They're novel for what we're able to give to a consumer and an in-facing user.
So I think things like the DEX and the borrow and lend products and all of those are hitting at this new way that people are interacting with crypto, which is bring it into your existing experience, create a true everything exchange that allows all these novel assets and primitives to finally be accessible to a mainstream consumer audience.
Could you tell me a little bit about your role as it pertains to where you sit between base, Coinbase?
Do you work at one or the other or both?
And like, just like, how does that work?
Because I think this is an issue a lot of people have is like, they know that Coinbase is a thing.
They know base is a thing, but where they intersect, overlap or are different from each other, people may not be clear on that.
Could you give us some more clarity on that?
Yeah, gladly.
So technically I fall underneath the Coinbase developer platform, which is the part of Coinbase that is responsible for building out all of our developer tooling and infrastructure and agent wallets and facilitator X4 and all those different things.
So I interface with the base team quite closely.
The base team also falls under Coinbase technically, but they're kind of doing their own thing, building out the infrastructure for the chain and interoperating with the Coinbase teams where it's necessary.
So for example, the collaborations between the consumer team on the base decks inside the Coinbase app that I previously mentioned.
And I interface with them a lot on the smart contracts and the schemes that we're building with the agentic economy.
Obviously, there are very nice sort of network effects and collaborative opportunities between what we're able to do by owning both the agentic wallet layer, but also the underlying chain and the stablecoin as well.
And all of those pieces and how they interplay together is primarily where I interact on the base side.
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Okay, I think that's very helpful.
So thank you for that.
I just want to make sure we're starting from the same starting position here in terms of understanding that.
Could you just give me a little bit of an overview of what I can do with AI or agents, I guess both really on Coinbase and base today, because there have been so many products that have come out of Coinbase, AI related and otherwise, I think some people kind of get a little bit lost in the noise.
What can you do with AI on Coinbase today?
Great question.
So it really comes down to two distinct features.
One is agentic payments and the other is agentic trading.
And they overlap and I'm happy to get into that.
But at the highest level, if you are a Coinbase retail user, the fastest, quickest path for you to start interacting with our AI products is through the Coinbase advisor.
It is an in-app experience that allows you to get fiduciary financial advice across all of the assets in your portfolio in a personalized manner.
So you can come in, you answer a quick questionnaire like you would with any sort of advisory.
product or financial advisor that you might go to.
And then you can just talk to it.
And you can say something like, hey, I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm a pretty low risk person.
Can you recommend me a portfolio?
And the advisor will construct you within a chat with a little widget that has the recommended breakdown for you specifically.
You can just tap on that and execute it.
And the whole idea there is that there is a orchestration gap that exists for traders today.
where there's a lot of people who have great high-level ideas, or maybe they just have a general semblance of their goals, but they don't necessarily have the time to go off and execute that, nor do they actually know how to take all of the different financial primitives that exist and compile them together in a way that actually leads to the outcome that they want.
So that's the advisor.
If you're more an advanced user and you want to plug in your trading experience into whatever agent harness that you're using, whether that be Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, whatever it might be, That's where Coinbase for agents comes into play.
So the way that I think about it is that every company is now going to have a two-pronged approach to their agent service.
They're going to have a boutique in-house experience, and that's what we have with Advisor.
And then we're also going to have an experience to plug into these existing chat interfaces where we might see users start to trend toward in the future.
And today even, there are hundreds of millions of monthly active users on ChatGPT.
That could become the primary service area through which they start interacting with money management.
So we want to be able to support both use cases in a pretty streamlined manner.
So that's the trading products.
On the payment side, we have X402.
And X402 at its core is a internet native payment standard, enabling your AI agents to go off and pay for whatever services on your behalf.
If you wanted to today, for example, go interact with a service to generate an image, you'd have to go to, say, OpenAI.
you'd have to create an account, fund that account, get this API key, which is like a string, a private key basically, and give that to your agent.
And only then can it actually start calling out to OpenAI and paying for things.
With X402, the whole idea is to let any wallet or even your Coinbase account directly go off and pay for services directly using your crypto wallet.
So broadly here, and I know I'm sort of brain dumping, so happy to dive into whatever sort of detail would make the most sense.
Broadly, we're building toward this future agentic economy.
Coinbase thinks there's going to be a massive opportunity at the intersection of agents and finance, agentic finance.
And part of that is trading, part of that is payments.
The two can interoperate together in very unique, interesting ways.
But broadly, when you give agents access to money, they become more financially dependent.
That makes them more autonomous and therefore more useful.
The brain dump is exactly what I wanted.
We can take these things apart piece by piece.
But I did want to just start with that sort of broad view of the products today and the vision there.
I want to go back to the first thing you started with, which is this SEC registered Coinbase advisor tool.
This is an AI powered SEC registered advisor.
I have a couple of questions about this.
The first one that comes to mind is AI is generally designed to sort of like go towards the middle.
And like people are kind of critical of a lot of it as being like mid or cliche driven.
How do you protect against that when you're giving financial advice to people?
Is this just like a, hey, fill in this questionnaire and we give you like a generic strategy?
Or like, talk to me about how you're actually going about making sure that this advisor tool is really giving people value and value that's relevant to them specifically.
So the model that the advisor is running behind the scenes has been created by a team of portfolio managers at Coinbase underneath our institutional asset management arm.
So a lot of the sort of groundwork in creating coherent, competent strategies and the framework for creating new strategies on the fly comes from real portfolio managers and financial advisors who have done this historically in their day jobs for decades.
Thinking about how this financial advice and Coinbase Advisor works, a common misconception with agentic trading is that it's something that's competitive with high frequency terms and that the idea is you can go tell Grok to go make me money.
That's not exactly how it works.
It's more so that the advisor is a great translation layer from natural language intent into these financial primitives.
And there's a wide use case and set of capabilities that users can get immediately.
value from today that aren't necessarily terribly complex.
The financial advisor traditionally is great for two things.
One is managing your money in a way that makes you not have to think about it at all.
And two is for the emotional comfort and response that they might give you if you call them in the middle of the night and say, hey, the market's tanking.
What should I do?
How should that work?
Both of those, I think, can be sort of uniquely handled by an AI.
But instead of the traditional advisor world, which requires you to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go give to an advisor, this is available to anyone at scale.
And through that, you're able to provide basic portfolio guidance, recommendations that are grounded in the truths that our portfolio managers are providing, or even simple things like tax loss harvesting.
A lot of Coinbase balances are down, great opportunity for you to tax loss harvest your crypto and save thousands of dollars.
And that's something that the advisor can proactively service to you as an opportunity.
Okay, so there are real professionals behind the scenes making this a uniquely capable tool as opposed to just throwing your bank account into an LLM and saying, make no mistakes.
That's helpful to know that.
How are you actually using this personally in practice?
Because again, I think this is a new tool.
Some people may be struggling how to think about how to start with this.
How are you personally using this tool or are you?
Yeah, so I use it quite often.
The main way that I find myself interacting with it is that when you start inside the Coinbase Advisor experience, there are various different widgets that are available, kind of proactive insights for you to action on.
And one of them is a portfolio update.
And that goes and searches the web.
It finds you all the relevant information around your holdings and gives you a real-time grounded in truth set of actions that you could take to help better position your portfolio against my overall top arching goals.
So I find myself doing that quite often.
The tax loss harvesting as well, I think is a great feature where I can just tap the button, sells all my crypto assets that are available at a loss, I can just rebuy them right back with another tap of a button.
So that was uniquely painful, but also very, very useful to people.
And one of the ones that I'm quite excited about us supporting in the future, but is supported today in Coinbase for Agents, is like a full auto rebalancing portfolio.
So currently I have my Claude code.
And I just told it, hey, rebalance my little section of my agentic portfolio to 80% S&P, 20% Bitcoin every week.
So if it deviates, gets off course, my agent can automatically handle that all for me.
It's a very generally safe procedure.
I've seen no hallucinations happen with this.
So it's quite straightforward to set up.
But you can also do some really interesting stuff as well, like invest like Warren Buffett.
or every time Elon tweets by the associated stock or crypto that comes along with that.
So really it's about whatever sort of high-level interesting thought or concept that you might have.
But I do think there's a lack in the market around the understanding of how these tools work and that's something that we could do a much better job of.
Okay, yeah.
And I think that's exactly the purpose of this podcast conversation.
I wanted to understand these things better because...
You know, there's all these things coming out and it's all exciting, but learning how to use it from somebody who actually understands this is very helpful.
So our audience will appreciate that.
I want to ask about another thing you mentioned in your brain dump answer, which was this idea of harnessing a user's preferred LLM and helping to incorporate that into their trading strategy.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what's supported today and how you're seeing that adopted by users on Coinbase?
Yeah, absolutely.
So the way that I would think about it is that the Advisor is great for this financial advice use case.
And if you're a simple, straightforward user, and you just want to be told what to do, you want to be able to have some sort of co-pilot to help you along, the Advisor is great.
However, its core limitation today is that it is human in the loop, and it's only available inside the Coinbase app.
So if I want to make a trade, I have to tap to execute it.
That, of course, is changing.
But with how rapidly technology is advancing, there's a massive cohort of users who once have been a little bit more powerful.
And for that, the Coinbase for Agents is a particularly interesting piece of technology.
It is a MCP server, basically a set of tools that you can give to any AI agent.
And the really powerful piece about this is that it is so composable because it is purely the execution res.
And what I mean by that is Cloud Code, Codex, all of these different harnesses support the ability to run automations or support the ability to write deterministic scripts of code that can just very logically execute without AI in the loop.
And for all of these, we can use Coinbase for agents to basically have an intern in my pocket to just manage my money for me.
I'm going to give it the very explicit goals that I want it to achieve, and it is going to go off and execute those for me.
Of course, only with my explicit consent, but on my behalf in a way that doesn't require you to be there, constantly monitoring my account.
You can set something up that checks the news every morning and finds you an interesting story and then immediately rebalances your position based off of that if you so chose.
Another particularly compelling concept is something that Vitalik actually read about a handful of years ago, where he hypothesized that AI agents would be the primary traders on low liquidity prediction markets, because the cost for them to go search the internet and find discrepancies in how these sub $10,000 markets are priced is so much lower than it would be for you or I, that they can actually make a couple of bucks in a pretty meaningful way and sustainably because it's something that these high frequency firms will never be able to touch because of how expensive it is to use humans for this.
Okay, so what I'm hearing you saying is that the advisor tool is kind of like a great entry point for beginners or for anybody.
But if there are more power users who want to harness an LLM and have it go, like you said, do some of these things that are high friction for humans, but not so much for AI, Coinbase is also starting to support that.
I'm curious about, I don't want to be a dick about how I asked this question, but I do want to hear your thoughts on this.
Robinhood made a lot of headlines with the launch of the Robinhood chain and forgive the term, but they a little bit.
kind of mogged Coinbase's base with some of the attention and just the volume that they've seen on this.
I'm curious your thoughts on the success that they've seen here, what lessons are learned from that and just what you think that you'd like to see Coinbase take from that in terms of lessons learned about what works and what's finding product market fit.
I think Robinhood chain is a great example of this multi-chain future that we're trending toward.
And one of the great quotes from Vlad about this is that they didn't want to be a rent seeker on another chain.
And I suspect that's something that'll be true across the board as it becomes simpler and simpler for people to spin up L2s and particularly those that inherit the security properties of Ethereum.
And broadly, it comes down to if you have a consumer audience with distribution and you have a sort of financial leaning or some sort of incentive to drive liquidity to this user group, why wouldn't you build your own chain?
Obviously, there are sort of power law effects that in aggregate mean that there are going to be winners and losers.
But for those with distribution, it seems like a very compelling option to build your own chain, whether it be an L1, an L2, or an L3, because of how easy it's gotten.
And I think Robinhood is an example of the reason to do that.
For an inherently speculative audience, they have found a lot of success with these early coins and tractions and attention.
And it will remain to be seen whether that lasts.
If we go deeper into a bear market, does that attention start to subside?
Is it the primary new flashy signing thing in the room?
And that's why people are trending toward it.
It's really hard to tell, but I do think that it is a nice kick in the pants to see and understand what the market is looking for and continue to compete at the forefront of that.
Some of the things that we've talked about already, Robinhood is offering some kind of version of as well, like the harnessing an agent to do trading thing.
They're trying to explore that as well.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on Coinbase and BASE's competitive edge in this marketplace, not just against Robinhood, but against, just like you said, so many other players who are exploring their own L1s or just bringing digital asset-focused products to market.
What keeps you excited about Coinbase and BASE?
What's the edge that you see there?
The first thing I see is the talent surrounding this Coinbase group that's building out AI.
We've been building now for around two or so years.
It started with AgentKit, which was this very early framework to give your AI access to a wallet.
And it was one of the first built by anyone and resulted in sort of this explosion around the excitement of agentic trading and agentic finance all the way back in like November of 2024.
And since then, I think we've continued to prove our thought leadership with X402 and the fact that that is now an open...
a neutral standard that is governed in the Linux Foundation by Shopify, Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, Amex.
Those are five names you would never expect to be in the same room governing an open standard, yet there they all are talking to one another and using this as the internet native payment standard going forward.
The other thing that I think is particularly interesting and where Quibus has a huge advantage is in the fact that it is a crypto-first platform.
I think Robinhood structurally is an exchange and that's great.
and they're going to be able to build some things faster than us.
But ultimately, as the world becomes more tokenized and increasingly put on chain, Coinbase's existing expertise is going to become all the more valuable because the composability that we have been able to enable over the past several years because of being a crypto first platform with the concept of wallets and addresses and all these things natively built in to the Coinbase stack, we're able to do some really interesting create some really interesting opportunities that aren't available to other platforms.
So one concrete example is enabling X402 payments directly from a user's retail USDC balance.
This is something that actually is coming out next week.
And the whole idea here is if you want to plug in Coinbase for Agents into your cloud code, that's great.
It can go search the web and it can trade for things, but it's not going to have access to all of the tools and services natively that you might want.
By giving your agent access to your retail USDC balance, it can go discover and pay.
for any sort of paid service it wants on the internet.
And for trading, this is particularly valuable because you can go find premium, non-public market data that helps give it its sort of edge in some sense.
And edge is something that's very hard to find in agentic trading.
So through the sort of broader vision that Coinbase has around the everything exchange, I think we're able to offer a much more coherent and competent set of products than competitors.
Real world assets like funds, treasuries, and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago.
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Everyone's talking about tokenizing them, but far fewer can actually do it and do it without cutting regulatory corners.
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That's a really great bull case.
Our audience here at Milk Road has been very locked in to Coinbase, to Robinhood, to a lot of what you guys have been building.
So I really appreciate you kind of giving the rah-rah pitch on that.
For anybody who missed it, I did a live stream with Sean Agarwal, who's the chief business officer and head of investor relations with Coinbase, to talk about the Q2 earnings that Coinbase just released.
And so one of the major takeaways I had from that conversation, Lincoln, I wanted to ask you about, which is the dominance that...
Coinbase is seeing for agentic payments.
You talked about this a little bit in your answer, but the dominance in terms of base getting so much of the stablecoin volume here and USDC in particular being the dominant coin that's being used for agentic commerce right now.
Talk to me a little bit more about that.
Why is USDC and X4R2 getting so much adoption in the rising agentic economy?
Coinbase is really building the backbone of this agentic economy that we see coming true over the next several years.
And part of our leadership position has been able to define where the vast majority of activity is taking place.
We have not only the wallets and the infrastructure and the accounts that already are pre-funded with USDC, but we're also building the rails on which these transactions are settling.
We're working on the stablecoin that the transactions settle in.
All of this means that there is a completely nice verticalized stack that Coinbase has to offer to users.
And the clients and customers who are engaging with agentic finance and agentic commerce, see the network effects that are building and come to base for that reason.
It sort of sells itself now.
We have this prospect of this X402 bazaar.
You can think of it kind of like the Google for agents because it's one thing if your agent could pay for something, but it has to be able to discover that it has to pay for something as well.
And that bazaar natively plugs into all of our infrastructure.
So our pitch to any customer or client is, hey, come take a story that you need to tell.
which is how does your business accept stablecoins and how does it become agent ready?
Do it in a single integration.
Do it for far cheaper than any other payment processor could provide you.
And as a result, you'll become natively discoverable to tens of thousands of agents, both those that are connected directly into users' Coinbase accounts, both those that are connected to AWS as an agent platform, and they're natively exposing the X402 Bazaar to all of those enterprise agents.
and also be available on some of these front ends where you can see activity that's going on in the X402 ecosystem.
For example, agentic.market, x402scan.com.
The value prop of building with this verticalized stack is you can tell this really nice better together story to have the most seamless integration and the cheapest, fastest, most efficient settlement rail all at the same time in the same place.
Tell me a little bit more about X402.
And, you know, I know that there are other competing alternatives to become this like open standard for agentic payments.
Why do you think X402 is winning or will win that?
And how important is it to Coinbase to get X402 to be sort of like the globally adopted standard for this?
Explorer 2 is a real moonshot bet.
And what I mean by that is if it achieves even a tenth of what it sets out to be, it's not going to be a successful business whatsoever.
The strategy that we're taking is very similar to what you saw with Google and Android.
When Google acquired Android, it really had one of two options.
One, it could have taken the closed source route that Apple did with iOS and only make it available on Google-specific hardware.
Or it could have made it, which it did.
into this open operating system platform that now as a consequence of being free and available for anyone to use, makes up 80% of the operating systems that exists from Kindles to cars to Google Pixels.
It's all over the place.
And that's the same exact goal that we want to achieve with X402.
If it doesn't become an internet data payment standard, we're really missing out on the massive opportunity to be captured by this.
And this is why I suspect we see interest and excitement from all these other third party players who are incentivized to build their own payment schemes on top of X402.
The nice thing about it is that it's not a crypto only standard.
It obviously started with crypto and there's a unique value proposition that crypto offers for microtransactions that happen at sub-sint velocity that can't really happen on the existing traditional payment methods like a card network.
However, you can still build these other networks in to support X402.
And as a result, you create this interoperable ecosystem where merchants that only accept Visa or MasterCard are now able to plug in to other merchants that they only accept crypto.
And the bridges and near-operability between these things is going to be made far easier by the fact that we do have X402 as the core underlying standard underneath it.
And as far as the importance to Coinbase, it's absolutely a critical part of the overall agentex strategy that we're trying to tell.
The other solutions that exist on the market, I don't think that they solve the same problem.
because they're great for plugging into an individual payment ecosystem, but they're very opinionated in that regard.
And that's where X402 wants to be different, is if Coinbeak captures 10% of global agentic trading volume, that is a massively bigger market than 100% of a payment standard that isn't really adopted quite well.
Okay, so there's a lot to that answer, but I appreciate you acknowledging that it's a moonshot and that there's a lot at stake for that.
I'm definitely paying attention to that because just like you said, whatever happens there, there's a lot of economic activity riding on that.
Lincoln, what the hell is a microtransaction?
This sounds like fintech doublespeak for some highly technical thing that most people don't really understand.
What makes a microtransaction different than a regular transaction?
Why are microtransactions so important?
In this machine-to-machine payments economy, I think we're going to see a massive explosion in microtransactions.
And really, this is just a categorization of an existing transaction that is somewhere in between 25 cents or lower.
It's really kind of a nebulous definition.
The reason that I think we'll see this is because for the first time, we as individual humans aren't going to be the primary actors on the internet.
This has been said time and time again now, but we're moving into this world where agents are interacting at the velocity at which humans could never really...
And practically where we're seeing this occur is through, if I have an agent and I want to go explore the internet, I want to go scrape all these different services and data pieces and whatnot.
Today, it's somewhat easy and it's still kind of free.
But I view this as being in the LimeWire Napster era of the internet.
And the sense that there is a gap between where the ultimately the sort of a genetic economy ends up and where we are today.
And the infrastructure and plumbing is being built for that.
to support these microtransactions becoming more popular.
So one very concrete example is Cloudflare has this monetization gateway product.
They are using X402 to allow web publishers, of which they have 25% of the internet traffic, or around 25% of the internet traffic using Cloudflare.
They're allowing all of those publishers to gate their website behind a small transaction.
So say for example, I want to go read an article on some publication.
This has been a very common sort of dream scenario for crypto for a long time is that you can gate articles and content behind a paywall, but it's never really been practical because the wallet technology wasn't there and the user friction to set that up and go to every single individual website and pay for those things meant that it just didn't make sense.
But now with agents who are actually the main economic actors on the internet, being the ones that are going off and paying for these things and try to get access to them, it finally makes sense for this utility-based economy to come online.
sort of replace this attention-based ads economy that we've seen thus far.
Okay.
So there's a lot that's happening with these transactions.
But just like you said, the agents don't have the friction that humans do.
So there's a whole bunch of potential economic things that are unlocked from this.
That kind of makes some sense.
I can see that.
I'm curious about what assets these agents are going to be transacting in, right?
Because what I think, I see two scenarios here.
One, which is just like, USDC seems to be the dominant coin of the realm in agentic finance, and that may continue to rise and just be the thing that everybody uses to transact if they have an agent that's making a transaction.
Or there's a reality, you tell me what you think of this, but like where they transact in almost anything, everything from Bitcoin to Ethereum to tokenized gold to micro shares of SpaceX stock.
Like what do you think about that reality and what assets or assets do you think is going to be the dominant one in this rising agentic economy?
The nice thing about agents is that by virtue of pushing all of the sort of wallet and tech to the back end to just let the agent deal with it instead of the human, is that this answer could change depending on the individual.
And with the ability to swap in and out of currency seamlessly, you can imagine that you have an agent that does trade in micro shares of SpaceX, but ultimately settles down to USDC because that's what a business would want to accept.
I think the long story short is that we're going to see a lot of businesses who want US dollars, want the safety and security that offers and for that reason, they'll ultimately accept USDC into their accounts.
But that doesn't preclude an agent from storing or holding some other asset as its store of value or taking an opinionated bet on a different type of settlement currency coming out in the future.
Okay, so in other words, the agentic part of this makes all of these assets sort of more or less fungible.
And then the user is allowed to decide what they want to transact in and then let the AI agent figure it out from there.
Is that what you're saying?
Yep.
Yep, exactly.
Okay, cool.
Well, bullish.
I want to hear more about something I've heard you talking about, which is this transition from a mobile first world to an agentic first world.
Because I think this is something that still sounds like science fiction to a lot of people.
What does this mean in actual practice?
How does this transition start to happen?
And yeah, like how do we go from a world where everybody has a smartphone and they're using that primarily to a world where agents are primarily the front end that people are interacting with and what are driving the economy?
Yeah, so to provide some context on this statement, the way that I view it is that the 2010s were defined by this shift from web apps to mobile apps.
And the 2020s are now being defined by the shift from mobile to agents.
And in some sense, this has already started.
There are, I think, a billion monthly active users across all the chat apps that exist.
And that's like one eighth of the world's population.
It was now interacting through natural language to primarily just search and have a companion.
But ultimately, I could see a lot more interesting use cases come out of this.
The way that I think this shift starts to happen further is we're in some sense reliant on the agentic harnesses and the automations that are in ChatGPT and Claude and all these more consumer-facing distribution centers to allow for things like automations that happen entirely on the user's behalf.
And I think the way that we'll start to see this trend play out is very similar to how we've seen self-driving cars proliferate over the last several years, where at first there is like stage one.
And stage one is very simple.
Maybe it could parallel park for you.
Maybe it had lane assist.
It was great.
It supported people who already knew how to drive, but nobody in their right mind would give those systems access to full self-driving potential.
However, over the past several years, as both the technology has improved, but more importantly, as user trust has improved in these systems, we've seen Wiimos become a commonplace item in San Francisco and I think various other cities now as well.
And I think we'll see a very similar trend with AI agents broadly.
Today, we're very clearly in this stage one world.
If a user has something that they want their agent to do, they will explicitly go say it.
They have to go connect it to whatever services they want.
All of that still is a pretty manual process.
People are generally quite skeptical of these agents' abilities.
However, as self-running agents become more common and more accessible, it starts to almost, in the same way that self-driving cars allow people who don't know how to drive to now get access to transportation.
It lets people who may not know typically how to interact with one of these services to be able to do so completely seamlessly.
I think a concrete example would be food delivery, stupid one.
But DoorDash just announced that they have this agent plug-in process.
Today, I could go tell my agent, hey, I want to order some McDonald's or something and basically treat it like a drive-thru.
And that's all fun and games.
That's pretty novel.
But over time, you can imagine if you truly wanted to, and I acknowledge that this is a ridiculous use case, you could have your agent...
just automate this for you.
And every day you have your food coming directly to your door.
It's different based on your mood.
I could be, hey, actually, I want Chinese tomorrow.
Can you just figure out some good place nearby and handle it all for me?
And it starts to become this fully autonomous process.
Maybe you send it to your parents, maybe you send it to wherever you want.
And I think we'll see this trend proliferate as well across business use cases and others.
But really what those use cases are, I think is still kind of up for debate.
Okay, so I hear what you're saying.
You're saying basically that as people get more and more accustomed to interacting with agents, they're going to do this less on a mobile device and more just directly talking to an LLM of some kind.
How do you think we move from this sort of experimental stage that we're in now towards that mass adoption?
And does Coinbase have a specific strategy around that and what that movement in that direction looks like?
So Coinbase specifically, the strategy is around...
that we've seen with X402 specifically, we have an amazing set of supply side.
We have people who are willing to accept payments from agents.
AWS, Cloudflare, all of these other providers have some sort of thing that they're wanting to do with agentic payments.
Where we're really seeing the gap is on the demand side.
We don't have a wallet in every consumer's hand.
And fortunately or unfortunately, the next sort of step function increase in the adoption of agentic finance and agentic commerce specifically is going to come.
from a massive, you know, 100 million plus user activation moment to get them access to wallets and the ability to pay for things.
Where I think Coinbase uniquely has an opportunity to drive that demand side is through our core competency, which of course is trading.
And I think that's why we're so focused on this agent, agentic finance narrative, because we have a set of users who's very interested in trading.
How can we best support them through agent interfaces and through this new sort of paradigm?
because of products we're now able to offer like the Advisor or like Coinbase for agents that can augment what these users can already do.
And if we can find just a little bit of sticky product market fit or even just a little bit of traction in the flywheel of agentic trading.
leading to more agentic payments happening, therefore increasing the demand for agents that have access to wallets.
I think that is how Coinbase can start to catalyze this narrative.
But also, of course, it happens to be because we're working with a lot of our enterprise partners to lay out the groundwork on which the rest of the agentic infrastructure and the agentic economy is going to come into place.
This is something that gets to this idea that I think has been something a lot of people in crypto have been wondering about, which is we seem to have an overabundance of block space.
There was a big issue with scaling crypto for a long time.
And now it seems like we've got so much supply for block space.
We're having trouble finding ways to create demand for enough of it that'll actually drive value and demand for digital assets and number go up for the crypto industry overall.
Do you think that that is going to happen?
Like, is this actually going to drive demand for crypto?
Or is it something where, you know, that fat protocol thesis doesn't play out and it drives a huge amount of demand for digital dollars, but doesn't actually bring any value back to the digital asset ecosystems that underlie these things?
It's an interesting question.
And part of it feels like the consequence of...
That's a great answer.
Great answer, Lindsay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, look, if I knew I'd go all in on it.
The way that I kind of see this playing out is given that agentic payments are primarily going to be the initial use case, there's really no need for that to happen on shared block space with DeFi or other activities.
And if we see such a massive amount of demand for agentic payments on, say, base, for example, there's no reason why you couldn't just build a parallel chain to solely handle agentic payments without any interruptions or...
sort of lack of user experience that you might be able to get.
Like I was saying earlier with these agentic payments and the agent holding the keys and being able to manage all this stuff for you, holding the keys in a metaphorical sense, obviously there's better custody than that, but like being in the driver's seat, it...
I feel like block space is kind of commoditized.
Like for use cases beyond DeFi, where there's actually a need for liquidity and trading, it feels like there's really no difference in the space that one chain can offer than the other.
And I think there is obviously benefits to having DeFi payments and trading all together in one place.
But of those three payments is obviously the on man out, where as long as you have on ramps and off ramps, you're able to do a lot of the things that you need to do.
Well, I think that's an extremely controversial answer, so I won't dive into that any deeper.
But Lincoln, I do want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this information with us.
I think that there is a lot of exciting things being built at Coinbase in AI and in crypto.
And you're a great communicator about these things in terms of just making it something people can understand.
So thank you so much for being on the Milcro show.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, feel free to check me out on X at Mer Lincoln.
Happy to take any DMs there, chat with people further.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm looking forward to catching up with you more as you continue to build out and figure out what this AI crypto intersection looks like.
This is great.
Thanks, John.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I hope you all enjoyed this episode as well.
Thank you for being here today.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all in the next episode of The Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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