Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase

Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, explains agentic finance: agents that pay with money and agents that grow it. He covers the path from AgentKit, an early experiment giving an AI a wallet, to x402, an open standard built on the long-unused HTTP 402 "payment required" code. x402 now handles hundreds of millions of agent transactions a month. Other topics are microtransactions as a replacement for the ad economy, agents running trades on simple instructions, and what two years of building taught Coinbase. Trust is earned step by step, and the AI is the enabler, not the product. He ends with a look at agents that can pay for their own upkeep. Chapters: - 00:00 What is agentic finance? - 01:20 AgentKit: giving an AI a wallet - 02:09 HTTP 402 and x402 - 03:13 How fast x402 took off - 04:24 Microtransactions vs. the ad economy - 06:23 Agents that grow money - 08:14 A weekend trade, by voice - 09:48 Lesson: trust is earned one step at a time - 11:35 AI is the enabler, not the product - 14:21 Where agentic finance is heading Lincoln Murr, Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!