As AI agents begin to outnumber human users online, businesses in commerce and finance are rapidly developing tools that enable these agents to act directly on behalf of people. Days after Robinhood rolled out trading agents that can execute trades on users’ behalf, Coinbase has launched its own agents capable of carrying out trades and covering the cost of premium research. The company announced on Thursday that users can connect the agent to their primary account and begin trading immediately. Users who prefer not to grant the agent access to their primary account can instead run it in a dedicated sandbox environment. Coinbase highlighted that the agent is able to leverage tools such as Coinbase Advanced, the firm’s professional trading platform, which offers advanced capabilities like TradingView charts for market analysis and trade execution. Users have the option to request portfolio rebalancing, instruct the agent to adopt a specific investment strategy and execute trades for them, or seek guidance on individual cryptocurrency transactions. Currently, the agent supports trading in cryptocurrency spot and derivatives markets, with equity and prediction market functionality slated for future implementation. Coinbase also stated that it will soon introduce custom limits, including maximum trade sizes, the specific services an agent can access, and spending caps. The company is leveraging the open x402 payment protocol, which it introduced last year in partnership with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near. With this standard, the agent can access premium research data APIs and on-demand computing for trading insights without needing any login or subscription. This website catalogs the services accessible to the agent via the x402 protocol. The trading platform has been aggressively investing in AI tools over the past several years.
