Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:01 [music] Thank you all for attending. My name is Lincoln. I'm the head of AI product at Coinbase. And today we'll be talking a little bit about how we're building the Agentic financial account. And I know what you're probably thinking. Coinbase, crypto, AI, a lot of buzzwords. But my hope is by the end of this conversation you have an understanding of what agentic finance is and that it's a very real thing that's happening.

00:33 You understand a little bit about what we've learned through this process of building this over the past two years and hopefully can take that and and distill some insights from it that are helpful for you. And I'm going to talk about a little bit about where I think we're heading with this whole narrative and how Aentic Finance will evolve over time.

00:49 Cool. So to understand first uh where where I'm going with this, I think it's important to look at what is Agentic Finance. And in my mind, Agentic Finance is anything that has to do with an agent that can manage money or has access to a financial account. Kind of obvious, but what does that actually mean? There's really two use cases that we're seeing.

01:09 It's agents that need to pay with money and agents that need to grow money. So the grow is a little bit more of a nent category. So I'll start by diving into the payment space. And to do that, I think it makes sense to start around 2 years ago with our first exploration into Agentic Finance, which was this tool we created called Agent Kit. The whole idea was prior to MCPs or really any sort of standardized AI tooling, we uh used the lang chain framework and added a wallet to that and we gave AI access to money in

01:38 crypto particularly. And at the time, this was a pretty novel thing. And I remember it was like 2 a.m. I was typing into my agent like, "Hey, can you send money somewhere?" And it did it. And I was like, "Whoa." These days, that's not impressive at all. But at the time, it was pretty fun. But as we gave this to our developers, we noticed that there is one core problem.

01:55 We gave an AI access to money, but we didn't really give it anything to pay for. This was a bit of an error on our part, and it's something that we wanted to solve, and we were able to do it by standing on the shoulders of giants. How many of you are familiar with HTTP status codes? Hopefully. Yeah, most of the room. Okay. So for those of you who aren't, it's basically a standard that defines how websites communicate and how uh information is transmitted across the internet.

02:22 One very popular one is called 404. It means there's an error. 200 means that there's a success. But there's one that actually has been in the internet spec for decades that nobody really ever implemented. And in fact, it was called the original sin of the internet by Mark and Jason that we never properly implemented this. For those of you who know a little bit about what we work on, you would know that this is the HTTP status code 402, which means payment required.

02:48 And the official definition of this in the internet spec is reserved for future use. Pretty generic, but we have a great opportunity here now with the inflection points of AI agents needing a clean, fast, efficient way to transfer money and engage in machine to machine commerce. And uh stable coins is a cheap, fast, efficient payment rail for us to build X42.

03:10 It's our standard for internet native payments. This says it's new. I guess it's still relatively new, but it came out in around last May. And since then, we've seen some very strong adoption. Honestly, much stronger than I ever thought we would. When it came out in May, our goal was for by the end of the year to have 25,000 transactions made by agents.

03:26 At the end of the year, we were actually seeing that every 17 seconds. And these days, we're seeing pretty incredible numbers across the board with tens of millions of volume and hundreds of millions of transactions occurring every 30 days. And if you'll notice from this list, you'll see that it's more than just crypto companies. You see Audion, Amx, uh, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, all these big names in payments who are engaging with X42 because we're building it as an open standard where anyone can use this how

03:57 they want to create a way for machine to machine payments to happen. So, I know there's been a lot of traction and comments around aentic commerce recently, especially with Muse and Grockbot and Stripe Link and this whole Amazon blocking agents com controversy and I think that's all a very straightforward use case and I could talk about a payments all day, but there's one that I want to touch on that I think is particularly relevant to microtransactions, which is something I'm very excited about with this whole agentic

04:22 payments narrative. So, if you all haven't noticed, the way that we've interacted across the internet has changed over the past couple of years. Now, we're primarily doing it through chat experiences or Google's AI overview instead of going to the actual websites themselves. And while this is all fine and dandy for the consumer, it's resulted in a bit of a problem for these publishers who have previously relied on ads revenue and human eyeballs to generate money for publishing their content.

04:47 It feels a little bit like we're in the lime wire era of the internet where you can scrape all this content for completely free and there's nothing really to be done about it. And recently we saw that bot traffic has now eclipsed human traffic on the internet for the first time. And this number is only going to increase as we see more people using AI and these traditional web services and and websites be disintermediated.

05:08 So how do we solve this problem? There's a very compelling opportunity here that's just starting to play out and it's it's really coming to life over the past couple of months for websites to gate their content behind a very small microtransaction specifically for agents. So the idea here would be if I publish a substack and I don't want an agent reading it for completely free.

05:28 I can charge them 1 10,000th of a scent. It's pretty trivial to the user. It should ultimately be fully abstracted away in the same way that your AI subscription handled this for you. But it's a meaningful revenue driver for these companies and we're going to start seeing a shift from this attention-based ads economy online to one that's primarily oriented around microtransactions and and utility.

05:48 And if you don't believe me, I I encourage you to look at AWS and Cloudflare. Both of them, they're these massive content delivery networks. Together, they control somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all internet traffic. And they've both recently enabled X42 micro uh transactions to gate any website that their publisher is creating. And though this hasn't seen very strong adoption just yet, it feels inevitable to me that over the coming months and years, this will be the new way that we have companies

06:16 differentiate and continue to undisintermediate themselves in some sense. So payments makes sense. We're seeing some pretty strong traction here. All is going well. But what about this whole grow with money thing? What could this possibly mean? Well, it's more agentic trading and investing. And the first time I heard about this, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world.

06:37 Why would I ever give my chat GBT access to my bank account? Or why would I ever tell Grock to make me money and actually expect it to work? But after digging into a little bit more, we found really three core use cases that exist today. I'm sure there'll be more going forward. And the the core differentiation between this whole Grock make me money thing and what's actually happening is the human just providing a teensy bit of agency.

06:59 And what I mean by that is the the human still sort of directing the agent to automate these tasks that would otherwise be very difficult. So say for example I just want to have my lowrisk you know 80% S&P 5% Bitcoin you know 15% T bill account fully managed and handled for me by an agent. I can just tell it to do that. Give it authorization with all the appropriate guards and whatnot and let it run and I don't have to think about my money.

07:25 Similarly we've seen autonomous execution be a pretty compelling use case. I'm going to go into an example about what this means later on, but you can imagine if you're interested in trading the the straight of four moves news and what's happening with oil. You could either be sitting in front of your keyboard at 3:00 a.m. watching these charts and watching the news, or you could tell the agent, hey, this is what I think is going to happen in these different scenarios.

07:44 If this happens, just make that trade. And the third one that's been particularly compelling is the idea of taking a high-level natural language idea and translating that into actual financial primitives in in a strategy. invest in space, invest in quantum, give me a low-risk portfolio, invest like Warren Buffett. All of these things for people who have these ideas, but they don't necessarily have the time to execute on them, nor do they exactly know how, is a very compelling opportunity for agents to come into the

08:12 foray. So, I'll give you one coherent example of something I was actually doing a couple weekends ago. So, you you all may remember that Daria put out this post, we must pace the frontier. This was over the weekend. This was about a month ago. And I saw on X that Elon said Daario is right. I was like, "Holy that's the first time that these two have agreed on anything.

08:32 That's probably going to be market impacting news come Monday." So, I went into my agent and I said, "I think that blank stock, you might be able to guess what it is, but I'm just not going to not going to go there. I think that blank stock is going to go down." And because we're now entering this era of 24/7 markets, I was able to put a short on these positions over the weekend just by talking into my phone.

08:50 Could I have done this by sitting in front of a computer and and pressing all the buttons manually? Yeah, totally. But having it completely handled for me was so easy. It let me go about my day and not really think about it. And since then, since this worked fairly well, I now have my agent searching over the weekend for any news that might be market breaking or blockbusting or whatever it might be.

09:09 And it lets me know anytime that happens such that I can make a trade off that going forward. And is this specific opportunity going to exist forever? Likely not. But the whole idea here is that it's so simple and so straightforward for me to just talk my ideas to life that there's a very compelling use case for for agents around this whole thing. This is another way to look at it.

09:30 This is kind of how we think about building this AI enabled financial account and it really, you know, breaks down into advanced traders and also more like retail consumers and and what exactly we want to do to provide them with the best-in-class experience across uh across the spectrum of capabilities that we can offer. So all that being said, we've we've been building this stuff for about two years now and we've had a lot of takeaways and lessons that have come into play and I think are pretty broadly applicable to

09:58 building for agents and building for this new agentic era. The first is that trust and autonomy are earned one step at a time. The most common question we get when we tell people that we're working on agentic finance is what if the AI goes rogue? Why would I give money to an AI agent? How can I trust that this thing is going to work? And it feels very analogous to me to the way that we've seen self-driving cars start to proliferate.

10:19 A couple of years ago, you'd be insane to try to use lane assist to parallel park, but now you go to San Francisco, you jump in a Whimo, and it feels completely natural. And we're seeing the same level of progression with the way that people view AI having access to money and finances. It starts with complete hesitation and and no real thought whatsoever to the concept.

10:39 Then people come around to the idea that, well, I mean, my AI is already chugging through credits. That's kind of a form of money. What's the big deal if I gave it a couple dollars to pay for some microtransactions? From there, you'll notice that these models are quite conservative and and aligned to the the user's needs, and they don't really do anything crazy.

10:59 Anecdotally, over the past couple of years, we've never seen any situation where a model goes and and blows up a user's entire account in a way that's completely uh un unfixable. So then we get to the point of a user feeling comfortable with the right guard rails and rules and safety policies and procedures in place to give their agent access to an isolated portfolio that they can attempt to grow however way they see fit.

11:20 One way is trading, but another is by offering a service and seeing if that agent can go make money by offering whatever it's doing and getting paid for that via these X42 rails that we're talking about. You can see how from there it just continues to to go on and on. The other thing that it's been particularly interesting to see is that especially in financial services, AI and agents are not the product.

11:41 It's actually the enabler. And this is a screenshot from one of our internal AI products called Coinbase Adviser. It's actually an SEC registered AI uh AI financial adviser. It's the the first in the world of its kind. And what we noticed is that AI and this concept of an AI giving financial advice, even though we've had a team of asset managers who are tuning this model, that's not the value prop.

12:02 The value prop here is that we can scale this advice to hundreds of millions of users, provide it for completely free, and give them the ability to talk to a trusted regulated entity 24/7. People actually don't care, don't even necessarily know or want to know that there's AI going on behind the scenes. And though it may be obvious with the chat button and whatnot, I think this is going to lead into more generative UI experiences that feel pretty traditional where you have agents behind the scenes and whatever sort of

12:26 interface you want on the on the front. Another thing we saw too is this whole AI chat experience. Though it's great for these generic use cases, it's very obvious that there's this blank canvas cold start problem that happens where users come in and they have absolutely no idea what they can do with this stuff. So, we started using these widgets as a way to show the user proactive insights and and opportunities that exist and and what they can start using these for.

12:52 And we've seen really strong conversion through this surface specifically because of the general nency and lack of education around agentic finance and what these opportunities are. And I suspect over time as people understand it and you see this a lot too with the, you know, Google Gemini and OpenAI ads, they're all trying to subconsciously drill into users the variety of use cases that you can take with these products.

13:15 Lastly, all these nextg agents, particularly Grockbot and Muse, they all have a microVM. It's like a little personal computer that they can run things on, have storage, have access to a file system. That's been huge for our development process. We're now able to create CLIs and MCPs to let users connect their Coinbase account into these agents. Nothing special.

13:34 What is special though is that we get requests all the time for things like, I want to do paper trading. I want to give my agent any money first. I just want it to trade entirely on its own. Or I want to back test or do all these different things. And prior to these agents being a thing, we would have to go to our internal brokerage team. We'd have to build within this random repository.

13:52 All these changes and and big tech things would have to persist and distill and percolate and and just a lot of work. But now we can just write a skill to write the paper trading code onto the user's machine. And while this probably isn't the most uh the the most efficient way to do it, it allows us to execute and build and iterate at the pace that our customers are demanding without having to worry about all of the implementation details and all of the dependencies and traditional software cycles that might come into

14:19 play. So with that, I want to leave you with a couple thoughts about where I think the space is going and why Agentic Finance is going to be such an interesting opportunity. My core thesis here is that financial independence leads to greater autonomy for these agents. And you can imagine that in the same way when a human has access to a card on the internet, they can do so much more than they can when they're just browsing and don't have access to pay for anything.

14:41 I think the same exact thing is true for agents. And we're going to get to a point where we can see these agents interacting over long periods of time. And maybe they're just bringing in humans at the edges when they have a specific regulated task that needs to be take place like forming a company or getting a legal opinion or any one of these tasks that is is going to maintain its its humanoriented factor for the foreseeable future.

15:05 There's a really interesting uh thing that we've been thinking about as a thought experiment which is what happens when an AI is able to sustain itself. You give it access to money, you give it access to a wallet and you allow it to start earning. Can it start to pay for its own inference? Can it start to pay for its own compute and its own upkeep? And does this start to feel a little bit like a like a protodigital life form of sorts where this AI is now able to just exist and subsist based on the the the quality of

15:28 the services that it's providing. And though I think this is a long way away, I think it's very possible to see how this concept comes back to life. And within the crypto space specifically, there's this concept of a DAO. It's a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. And it's been an idea for for almost a decade now, but there's never been really any interesting implementation where there's automation at the center and humans at the edges.

15:47 But I think now is the time where this is finally going to become a thing. You have an AI that follows a set of rules and has access to a treasury to manage at that core and it can hire out humans to do other tasks at the edges, but it's really this self-sustaining uh organization that that uses AI and agentic finance to make that all come to life. Another example being self-driving car that owns and run itself.

16:06 Give it access to money. let it take people on taxi rides, use that money to pay for its operation and maintenance and upkeep and whatnot. It it's a very interesting thing and you know, who knows how long it'll be until that comes to life, but it feels inevitable at some point. And the the whole idea here being that agents are just going to be start transacting at the speed of machine to machine commerce.

16:24 They are going to be both paying and earning and building and ultimately I think it's going to be the primary way that we see money move across the internet and the velocity is which we've never really seen before. So that's all I had. really appreciate everyone's time today. If you're interested in in collaborating or jamming, I would highly recommend you play around with X42 and the Coinbase MCP and all of our fun products.

16:43 I promise you, they're much easier than you think to get started with them. And uh yeah, thank you all. Thank you all for your time.