AI Agents Are Fueling a New Era of Crypto Payments, Says Pollak

Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak has said autonomous AI agents are creating a new “demand center” for crypto payments. 

This comes shortly after Coinbase-backed x402 expands machine-to-machine settlement and the wider ecosystem begins to add marketplace and discovery layers on top of those rails.

“What was almost impossible nine months ago is now totally possible,” Pollak said in an interview with CoinDesk.

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Coinbase describes x402 as an open payment protocol that revives HTTP 402 Payment Required, letting developers and AI agents pay for digital services directly over HTTP with stablecoins. 

In its documentation, the company says the system is designed to remove accounts, sessions and more complex authentication flows from paid online access, replacing them with a request, payment instruction, signed payload and verification loop.

Keep in mind that AI agents do not fit neatly into the account-based model used by card networks and subscriptions. Pollak stated that autonomous software can already reason, call tools and coordinate workflows, but still cannot function at scale unless it can hold assets, make payments and settle obligations without human intervention.

That gap was the “last mile” problem for AI and he said open standards such as x402 are designed to close it. 

Machine-Native Payments

Under the model, a server quotes a price, asset, chain and destination, then the client retries the request with proof of payment, creating a pay-per-use flow that is better suited to software than to people entering card details or managing monthly accounts.

Coinbase says x402 is already being used for API services, digital content, paywalls and autonomous agent purchases. Those use cases line up with Pollak’s broader thesis that agents operating entirely in software will want payments that are just as programmable as the services they consume.

In an April 20 post introducing Agentic.Market, Coinbase said the x402 ecosystem had already processed more than 165 million transactions and over US$50 million (AU$72 million) in volume across more than 480,000 transacting agents.

Finally, Pollak stated that the idea is to create an open marketplace where AI software can just “run wild”, meaning agents being able to discover, create, and process payments in real-time.

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