- Coinbase Business rolled out three tools on its first anniversary: Agent Checkout for merchants, Coinbase for Agents for automated trading, and a software kit for developers.
- Payments settle in USDC over x402, an open standard that revives the dormant HTTP 402 code so an AI agent can pay for a web resource without an account or subscription.
- The unit has signed about 5,000 customers and processed roughly US$1 billion in combined payments and trading volume since June 2025.
Coinbase Business marked its first anniversary on Thursday by launching tools that let companies accept payments directly from autonomous AI agents, settling the transactions in USDC over the x402 standard the exchange built.
The rollout has three parts. Agent Checkout lets a merchant accept payments from AI agents inside the account it already uses, with no separate checkout to build.
Coinbase for Agents connects AI systems to trading and investment workflows, adding real-time market data feeds and letting users set trading rules in plain English.
A software development kit lets developers add agent payments to their own services in a few lines of code.
Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu, head of Coinbase Business, called agentic payments one of the company’s “most high-conviction bets”, saying Coinbase began investing in the idea years ago after deciding autonomous commerce would reshape the internet.
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How x402 Works
x402 takes its name from the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code, a placeholder that has sat unused in web browsers for decades.
When an AI agent hits a paywalled endpoint, such as an API or a data feed, it pays in stablecoin and continues the task in the same request, without opening an account or signing up for a subscription.
Payments settle in USDC on Base and other supported networks.
The standard is spreading beyond Coinbase. As of recentlyl, the x402 network had processed more than 165 million transactions and over US$50 million (AU$71.5 million) in volume. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol supports x402, and Sam Altman’s World project uses it through its AgentKit toolkit.
Coinbase Business launched in June 2025 and has signed about 5,000 customers, processing roughly US$1 billion (AU$1.43 billion) in combined payments and trading volume with a team of about 12.
The new tools extend that base from payments between companies to payments from software. Coinbase says businesses also earn a rewards rate on idle USDC held in the account, alongside accepting agent payments.
Coinbase has been building toward this for months, launching agentic wallets earlier in the year and backing stablecoins as the settlement layer for machine-to-machine commerce.
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