AI Engineer hosted Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, as he laid out why AI agents will need their own bank accounts and how Coinbase is trying to supply them. Murr said the firm's open standard for machine payments, x402, had already scaled far past an early goal of 25,000 agent transactions by year end to that volume every 17 seconds by December, and now runs at hundreds of millions of transactions every 30 days with tens of millions in volume. As of April 2026 the network had reached more than 165 million transactions, about $50 million in volume and 480,000 transacting agents, according to Turnkey. Early flows are still experimental and reversibility and fraud controls are thin. Not financial advice. Markets move fast.
Agentic finance, as Murr defines it, is any system where an agent can manage money or hold a financial account.
That breaks into two jobs. Agents that need to pay, and agents that need to grow money. The pay side came first. About two years ago Coinbase shipped Agent Kit, which grafted a crypto wallet onto the LangChain framework before standard tooling like MCP existed. Murr said he was up at 2 a.m. asking an agent to send money and watching it work, then hit the obvious gap. The agent had money but almost nothing native to pay for.
Murr's answer leans on an old piece of web plumbing. HTTP status code 402 means payment required, a code reserved for future use that the internet never really implemented. Coinbase's x402 revives it as internet native payments over stablecoins, which Murr frames as cheap, fast rails for machine to machine commerce. He said adoption now stretches beyond crypto native firms to PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and others, a contrast that matters because it pits an open, stablecoin settled standard against card network settlement and PayPal's own agent checkout efforts that are racing to define how agents pay at checkout.
The microtransaction pitch is the clearest near term use. Murr argued publishers losing ad revenue as chat answers and AI overviews replace clicks can gate content with tiny charges, even one ten thousandth of a cent, abstracted inside an AI subscription. He pointed to AWS and Cloudflare, which together handle around 40% of internet traffic, both enabling x402 gating for sites on their networks, though he acknowledged adoption there is still early. Bot traffic has now eclipsed human traffic, he said, which tightens the squeeze on ad supported media if that gating does not spread.
