Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak says AI agents are the next big wave for crypto payments
Pollak, who will be speaking at Consensus Miami 2026 next month, also sees the open-source protocol x402 as a key part of that wave.
What to know:
- AI agents are rapidly gaining autonomy and increasingly need native, programmable payment systems, positioning crypto rails like Base and standards like x402 as core infrastructure for “agentic commerce,” said Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak in an interview.
- Pollak’s broader thesis is that crypto adoption will come not from hype, but from invisible integration, as agents (and humans using them) seamlessly transact in the background without realizing they’re using blockchain.
“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.
