[Digital Today reporter Yoonseo Lee] Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is opening a feature for business customers to receive USDC payments directly from artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

According to blockchain media outlet Cryptopolitan on July 23 (local time), from this week Coinbase business customers will be able to receive USDC sent by AI agents immediately, without separate integration work.

The feature is one pillar of three product expansions Coinbase is pursuing. The core is to change the payment structure for an environment in which software, not people, makes purchases. Coinbase sees a need for agent-friendly payment methods for merchants.

The business payment feature operates based on the x402 payment standard built and fostered by Coinbase. Settlement is handled by Coinbase Payments, and Coinbase business users can turn on the feature without adding separate settings. USDC transactions are processed instantly and are not reversible. Reusable payment links and automatic collection of buyer data are also provided.

Sid Coelho-Prabhu (시드 코엘료-프라부), who oversees Coinbase Business, said the essence of transactions remains the same. He said a transaction always has two elements, and buyers need cards and bank accounts while sellers need bank accounts and checkout counters. He added, "We re-architected how transactions work for a new online agent economy."

It was also confirmed that actual inflows of AI agents are already appearing. Last month, agent visits on the Base documentation page surpassed human visits for the first time, leading to the assessment that AI agents using online services are rapidly increasing.

Along with this, Coinbase expanded the 'Coinbase for Agent' feature it launched last month. The product, based on the Model Context Protocol, connects user accounts with AI assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Exchange customers can now check, in real time, orders opened by agents and orders currently in progress. Order status, price and quantity are also updated in real time.

Use is centered on natural-language commands. If users enter conditions in sentences, agents look at market data and execute trades. Coinbase said that if users give instructions such as "Buy if Ethereum falls 5 percent" or "Sell when my order is filled," an agent monitors the market and executes. The feature uses the same websocket market data feed that Coinbase provides to its institutional trading desk.

Features for developers were also added. The Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) x402 SDK is designed to let developers attach agent payments to APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and web services with three lines of code. The tool is a pre-configured form of the open-source x402 standard by Coinbase, and it focuses on reducing the work developers must individually assemble by bundling payment processing and scaling functions.

As AI agents are given authority to trade and spend, security issues are also highlighted. In April, $600 million was taken from a DeFi protocol due to an AI attack. Coinbase is responding by separating agent portfolios from users' main balances and applying limits on spending caps, trade size and the range of services accessible.

Coinbase previously disclosed the feature in June and said it enabled AI assistants to trade cryptocurrencies, query market data and pay service fees via x402 within user-defined settings. At the time, Coinbase head of AI products Lincoln Murr (링컨 머) said x402 was a protocol developed together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Circle and Near. He also said x402 processed 75 million transactions and handled $24 million in transaction volume over 30 days.

The update is seen as an extension of a move by Coinbase to bundle AI agent payments, trading and developer tools into one package and expand into commerce infrastructure. Coinbase expanded the basic structure of agent-based online commerce at once by combining a payment standard, trading connections and developer tools.

one year of @CoinbaseBiz. my second 0 to 1 at @coinbase businesses can't get enough crypto and stablecoins - doesn't feel like a bear market to us pic.twitter.com/CfCQfGEYK9