The rapid rise of AI agents is beginning to reshape how payments happen 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 totally possible,” Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the accelerating capabilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, one need is becoming clear: they require native ways to transact.
“Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software,” said Pollak, who will be speaking at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
That shift is fueling interest in so-called “agentic payments,” where AI systems can autonomously pay for services like data access, compute or travel bookings.
Pollak said he hopes a key piece of that stack will be x402, an open-source payments protocol that Coinbase and collaborators like Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard have been developing, which 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, basically for free,” Pollak said.
Early traction is already visible. According to Pollak, roughly $48 million in payment volume has flowed through X402 so far, with about 95% of transactions occurring on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network founded by Pollak and incubated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also expanding quickly, 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” businesses are beginning to emerge, Pollak said the bigger near-term shift will come from people augmenting themselves with AI.
“The 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 the solution isn’t better marketing, but invisibility.
“It’ll be a lot easier to sell crypto when you don’t have to tell people about it, they just experience it,” he said.
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