Coinbase: "Finance Was Built for People Who Sleep"

• The company argues that agents need to operate without constant human intervention.
• AiFi envisions financial operations and payments executed by software.

Coinbase suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) agents are beginning to participate in economic activities, and this development exposes some limitations of traditional financial infrastructure.

Intelligence alone is not enough, the company states in a statement dated August 27, 2026, where it elaborates on the concept of Agentic Finance (AiFi).

Coinbase uses this term to refer to a financial infrastructure designed for agents capable of researching, making decisions, and executing actions on behalf of individuals and businesses.

The proposal stems from a critique of the existing financial system. Finance was built for people who sleep, asserts Coinbase. According to the company, many current mechanisms assume that behind every transaction there is a person, while an AI agent may need to operate continuously.

The company points out that many payment methods require legal names, billing addresses, or human intervention, elements that can become obstacles for autonomous systems. In response, it argues that agents need an always-active, programmable, global infrastructure capable of managing fast and cheap payments.

Coinbase divides AiFi into two main areas: agentic finance applied to trading and agentic finance applied to commerce.

In the first case, agents can monitor markets, manage workflows, and execute strategies under pre-established conditions. In the second, they can compare products, acquire information, or pay for services while performing a task.

The concept also envisions a different relationship between software and money. The real change occurs when an agent can pay, states Coinbase. The company proposes that an agent could locate a payment resource, carry out the transaction, and continue with its task without having to create an account, enter card details, or subscribe to a service.

This model would allow payments for specific units of work, such as a query to an API, a dataset, research, or computing power. Coinbase describes this dynamic as software paying software, in real-time, exactly for what it needs.

The financial autonomy of agents, however, would be limited by the conditions set by their users. People and businesses establish the rules, permissions, limits, and safeguards. The software operates within them, the company notes.

In this way, AiFi represents for Coinbase a potential shift in the economic infrastructure of the internet: not only AI systems capable of providing information but agents that can execute certain financial operations within parameters defined by humans.

It is worth clarifying that beyond the AiFi concept presented by Coinbase, the participation of AI agents in finance is not new, and gradually, infrastructures specifically designed for them are being created. CriptoNoticias reported, for example, that AI agents have already conducted over 100 million transactions on the Base network, a second layer of Ethereum.