The rapid rise of AI agents is starting to reshape the way payments happen online, and according to Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak, crypto infrastructure is becoming a natural fit.
“What was almost impossible nine months ago is now completely possible,” Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk, pointing to the accelerating capabilities of autonomous AI systems. As these agents evolve, one need becomes apparent: they require native ways to transact.
“Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software,” said Pollak, who will speak at Consensus Miami 2026 next month.
This shift is fueling interest in so-called ‘agentic payments’, where AI systems can autonomously pay for services such as data access, computing or travel bookings.
Pollak said he hopes a key part of that stack will be x402, an open-source payments protocol that Coinbase and collaborators like Microsoft, Google and Mastercard developed that enables on-demand API payments without subscriptions or traditional billing systems.
Instead of relying on old rails, blockchain-based payments allow agents to “make a single API call or a smart contract call and move money globally, instantly and basically for free,” according to Pollak.
Early traction is already visible. According to Pollak, approximately $48 million in payment volume has flowed through X402 to date, with approximately 95% of transactions taking place on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network founded by Pollak and incubated by Coinbase. The ecosystem is also expanding rapidly, with integrations of AI providers, data platforms and travel services that agents can tap directly.
According to Pollak, 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 have free rein,” he said, describing a system in which software can seamlessly discover, buy and use digital services in real time.
As fully autonomous “zero-human” companies begin to emerge, Pollak says the bigger shift in the near term will come from humans 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 that the solution lies not in better marketing, but in invisibility.
“It will be a lot easier to sell crypto if you don’t have to tell people about it, they just experience it,” he said.
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