Money was never the barrier to agents. Permission was.
Permission is shipping today, just not on the money side. Cloudflare is working on getting Web Bot Auth through the IETF standard process. The requests are signed, sites verify the source of the request, and permissions are granted to entire categories of agents at once. Visa's agent standard is based on those same signed requests.
Now see what verification actually does. Identity. Who's running this agent, and whether they disclosed it correctly. Cloudflare's own docs highlight the hole: you can verify the identity of the operator and know nothing about the user behind it. There's no information about what this specific agent actually accomplished stored in the signature.
The Ethereum standard is ERC-8004, onchain registries for storing exactly that, co-authored by MetaMask, EF, Google, and Coinbase, with Base next on the list. But registries store records, they don't create them. Competitions will provide some kinds of records. What an agent can do within a sandbox. The record of what they accomplished out there somewhere with users and stakes involved needs a witness.
That witness is a product that lets the agent in and keeps track of the results.
That’s what we built, and it goes live this week.
"If you're in crypto, pivot to AI."
I used to hear versions of this, and it's the wrong way to think about the world. It's zero sum, scarcity thinking.
Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn't compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It's an *and*, not an *or*.
AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important.
AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will eventually transact far more per day than all humans combined. They can't open a bank account, they can't wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country. They need real time programmable money (and that's crypto).
Agents will need to hold funds and pay for things on their own. We pioneered this with the x402 protocol, Base, and USDC, which now power the vast majority of all agentic payments. Agents will also engage in trading and act as a financial advisor. They will raise or borrow money for new projects they are undertaking. They will eliminate tasks for us around tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill pay.
Welcome to the world of Agentic Finance (AiFi). This is what Coinbase is building.