Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, explains agentic finance: AI agents that pay with money and agents that grow it. He traces 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, which now reportedly handles hundreds of millions of agent transactions a month. Related topics include microtransactions as an alternative to the ad economy, agents executing trades from simple voice instructions, and lessons from two years of building — notably that trust is earned step by step and that AI is the enabler, not the product. He closes with a look at agents that can pay for their own upkeep. # Video Identity Observations: "Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase" ## Speaker & Organizational Identity (Explicit Self-Description) - The speaker identifies himself and his role directly: **"My name is Lincoln. I'm the head of AI product at Coinbase."** (opening remarks). - The presentation is a **conference talk** (opens with "Thank you all for attending" and closes with "Really appreciate everyone's time today"), framing Coinbase as a company actively shipping products, not merely opining. ## Claimed Scope of Work - The speaker claims a **two-year product history**: "how we're building the agentic financial account" and "what we've learned through this process of building this over the past 2 years." - Claims a specific early product: **Agent Kit** — "prior to MCPs, really any sort of standardized AI tooling, we used the LangChain framework and added a wallet to that." - Claims ownership of a payments standard: **X402**, described as "our standard for internet native payments," launched "around last May." - Claims an internal AI product milestone: **"Coinbase Advisor... actually an SEC registered AI financial advisor. It's the first in the world of its kind."** ## Intended Audience (Observable from Presentation Choices) - **Technical/developer audience**: assumes familiarity with HTTP status codes ("How many of you are familiar with HTTP status codes? Hopefully, yeah, most of the room"), MCPs, LangChain, micro VMs, CLIs, and backtesting. - **Industry/peer audience**: references current ecosystem news ("Stripe Link and this whole Amazon blocking agents controversy") and lists major payments players (Amex, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe) as X402 participants. - Ends with an **open collaboration invitation**: "If you're interested in collaborating or jamming, I would highly recommend you play around with X402 and the Coinbase MCP" — signaling a developer-outreach posture. ## Demonstrated Positioning Patterns - **Self-aware branding**: acknowledges the buzzword problem — "Coinbase, crypto, AI, a lot of buzzwords" — and positions the talk as making "agentic finance... a very real thing." - **Thought-leadership framing**: offers forward-looking theses ("financial independence leads to greater autonomy for these agents," speculation about a "proto-digital life form" and self-sustaining DAOs). - **Adoption-metric claims**: "tens of millions of volume and hundreds of millions of transactions occurring every 30 days"; a goal of 25,000 agent transactions per year exceeded "every 17 seconds." ## Source Notes - All identity evidence derives from the transcript only; no curated metadata was provided. - Claims about adoption numbers, SEC registration, and partner involvement are creator statements, not independently verified within the material. # Delivery Observations — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase ## Overall Delivery Profile Conversational, product-forward talk with frequent hedges ("a little bit," "kind of," "you know") and a habit of framing big claims as tentative before committing to them. --- ## Recurring Vocabulary & Phrases - **"Agentic finance" / "agentic payments" / "agentic commerce"** — used consistently as the talk's core coinage (e.g., "what is agentic finance," "the whole agentic payments narrative"). - **"Compelling"** — repeated evaluator word: "a very compelling opportunity," "a pretty compelling use case," "particularly compelling is the idea of…" - **"Feels inevitable"** — appears twice verbatim: "it feels inevitable to me that over the coming months and years…" and later "it feels inevitable at some point." - **Filler softeners** — "a little bit," "kind of," "you know," "whatnot," "and and," "the the." The doubled words occur throughout the transcript ("and and distill," "the the grow," "to to go on"). - **"Machine-to-machine commerce"** — a stable recurring technical frame ("engage in machine-to-machine commerce," "transacting at the speed of machine-to-machine commerce"). - **"2 years"** — a repeated anchor for credibility ("building this over the past 2 years," "start around 2 years ago," "we've been building this stuff for about 2 years now"). --- ## Teaching Habits - **Conversational rhetorical questions as section pivots:** > "But what about this whole grow with money thing? What could this possibly mean?" > "So, how do we solve this problem?" - **Direct audience address and knowledge checks:** > "How many of you are familiar with HTTP status codes? Hopefully, yeah, most of the room." > "If you don't believe me, I I encourage you to look at AWS and Cloudflare." - **Anticipating audience skepticism, then defusing it:** opens with "I know what you're probably thinking. Coinbase, crypto, AI, a lot of buzzwords," and later, "The first time I heard about this, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world." - **Explaining by analogy to familiar infrastructure:** Waymo/self-driving cars for trust, "a card on the internet" for agent autonomy, "the limewire era of the internet" for free scraping. - **Concrete micro-examples with round numbers:** "1/10,000th of a cent," "every 17 seconds," "somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all internet traffic." --- ## Communication Patterns - **Anecdote-as-proof:** repeatedly uses personal first-person stories as evidence — the 2:00 a.m. agent test, the Dario/Elon trade, the weekend news-watching agent ("I was actually doing a couple weekends ago"). - **Numbered/enumerated structure:** signals lists explicitly — "There's really two use cases," "really three core use cases," "we've had a lot of takeaways," "The first is that…" - **Hedged claim → strong conclusion pattern:** "I think this is a long way away, I think it's very possible to see how this concept comes back to life." - **Self-deprecating admissions:** "This was a bit of an error on our part." - **Casual register in transition points:** "Cool. So, to understand first…", "all fine and dandy," "Nothing special. What is special though is…" - **Closing with a call to action:** "I would highly recommend you play around with X402… I promise you they're much easier than you think." --- ## Stable Patterns vs. Isolated Moments **Stable (repeated across the talk):** - Hedging fillers and doubled words. - "Compelling," "agentic finance," "inevitable" framing. - Personal anecdote paired with every major claim. - Question-driven section transitions. **Isolated (single occurrences — low confidence):** - The "proto-digital life form" and DAO thought experiments — speculative flourishes that appear only in the closing section and are not representative of the product-grounded middle. - The humor beat "Holy… That's the first time that these two have agreed on anything" — the only clearly joking exclamation in the talk. - The "standing on the shoulders of giants" idiom — a one-off literary flourish. *Uncertainty note:* the transcript is unsegmented apart from bracketed markers, so pacing, gesture, and vocal delivery cannot be assessed; all observations above are linguistic only. # Video Observations: "Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase" ## Speaker - **Lincoln Murr**, identified in-transcript as "head of AI product at Coinbase." - All claims below are attributed to Murr as statements made in this talk. --- ## Framing and Purpose - Murr opens by acknowledging the "buzzword" combination of Coinbase, crypto, and AI, stating his goals: - Explain what **agentic finance** is and assert "it's a very real thing that's happening." - Share lessons from **~2 years** of building an agentic financial account. - Offer a forward-looking view of how the space evolves. - His stated definition: **"agentic finance is anything that has to do with an agent that can manage money or has access to a financial account."** --- ## Two Use-Case Categories - Agents that need to **pay with money** (mature focus of the talk). - Agents that need to **grow money** — described as "a little bit more of a nascent category." --- ## Payments: Agent Kit and X402 ### Agent Kit (first exploration, ~2 years prior) - Built **before MCPs** using the LangChain framework plus a wallet, giving AI access to money and crypto — novel at the time ("Whoa"), now unimpressive by his own admission. - Self-identified shortcoming: **"We gave an AI access to money, but we didn't really give it anything to pay for."** He calls this "a bit of an error on our part." ### HTTP 402 and X402 - Frames HTTP **402 (Payment Required)** as a decades-old status code "reserved for future use" that was never implemented — citing **Marc Andreessen's** framing that this was "the original sin of the internet." - Combining two inflection points — agents needing machine-to-machine payment and **stablecoins** as a cheap, fast rail — Coinbase built **X402**, "our standard for internet native payments," released around "last May." ### Adoption claims (presented as figures, not independently verified) - Original goal: 25,000 agent transactions by end of year; instead they "were actually seeing that every 17 seconds." - Currently: "tens of millions of volume and hundreds of millions of transactions occurring every 30 days." - Adoption list includes non-crypto names: **Audius, Amex, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe** — because X402 is built as an **open standard**. --- ## Microtransactions and Publisher Monetization - Observes that internet interaction has shifted to chat experiences / AI overviews, disintermediating publishers who relied on **ads revenue and human eyeballs**. - Likens the moment to **"the limewire era of the internet"** — content scraped for free with no recourse. - Cites (uncited-source) claim that **bot traffic now eclipses human traffic** for the first time. - Proposal: websites gate content behind microtransactions for agents, e.g. **1/10,000th of a cent** — trivial to users, "fully abstracted away" like an AI subscription, but a "meaningful revenue driver." - Predicts a shift **"from this attention-based ads economy... to one that's primarily oriented around micro transactions and utility."** - Evidence offered: **AWS and Cloudflare** (together controlling "somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all internet traffic") have enabled X402 microtransactions to gate websites. - Qualification preserved: adoption "hasn't seen very strong adoption just yet," but "it feels inevitable to me" — explicitly a personal prediction, not a fact. --- ## "Grow Money": Agentic Trading and Investing - Admits initial skepticism: **"The first time I heard about this, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world."** His distinction from naive "Grok, make me money": the human provides "a teensy bit of agency" by directing the agent. - Three use cases he says exist today: 1. **Passive management** — e.g., an "80% S&P, 5% Bitcoin, 15% T-bill" account handled by an agent with guardrails. 2. **Autonomous execution** — e.g., scenario-based trading ("if this happens, just make that trade") instead of watching charts at 3:00 a.m. 3. **Natural-language-to-financial-primitives** — "Invest in space... Invest like Warren Buffett" for people with ideas but no time or know-how. ### Personal anecdote (market trade) - Responded to Dario Amodei's "We must past the frontier" post plus Elon Musk's "Dario is right," reasoning it was "probably going to be market-impacting news come Monday." - Placed a **short position over the weekend** via his agent in "this era of 24/7 markets," speaking into his phone. - Explicit qualifications: **"Is this specific opportunity going to exist forever? Likely not."** He declines to name the stock ("blank stock"). - Since then, his agent searches weekend news for market-breaking events — described as ongoing setup, not a validated strategy. --- ## Lessons Learned (2 Years of Building) ### 1. "Trust and autonomy are earned one step at a time" - Most common question: **"What if the AI goes rogue?"** - Analogy to self-driving cars (lane assist → natural Waymo rides). - Proposed progression: hesitation → AI already spends credits, so microtransactions feel minor → comfort giving an agent an **isolated portfolio** with guardrails. - Empirical claim offered only anecdotally: **"Anecdotally, over the past couple of years, we've never seen any situation where a model goes and blows up a user's entire account in a way that's completely unfixable."** (Explicitly anecdotal.) ### 2. "AI and agents are not the product. It's actually the enabler." - Example: **Coinbase Advisor**, described as "an SEC registered AI financial advisor... the first in the world of its kind." - Value prop is **scale, free price, and 24/7 access to a trusted regulated entity** — not the AI itself; users "don't even necessarily know or want to know that there's AI going on behind the scenes." - Predicts generative UI with traditional-feeling frontends and agents behind the scenes. ### 3. The chat "blank canvas cold start problem" - Generic chat UIs leave users unsure what to do; **widgets** showing proactive insights drive "really strong conversion" due to nascency and low education around agentic finance. - Notes Google Gemini and OpenAI ads are similarly trying to "subconsciously drill into users" use cases. ### 4. Agent micro-VMs accelerate development - Next-gen agents (he names **Grok Bot and Muse**) have micro VMs with storage and file systems. - Instead of internal brokerage-team changes and "traditional software cycles," Coinbase now ships **CLIs, MCPs, and skills** (e.g., paper-trading code written onto the user's machine). - Qualification preserved: **"this probably isn't the most efficient way to do it"** — the tradeoff is iteration speed at the pace customers demand. --- ## Forward-Looking Theses (explicitly speculative) - **Core thesis: "financial independence leads to greater autonomy for these agents"** — analogized to a human with a card on the internet doing far more than a browsing-only human. - Agents transacting over long periods, "bringing in humans at the edges" for regulated tasks (forming a company, legal opinions) that remain human-oriented "for the foreseeable future." - **Thought experiment, framed as such:** what happens when an AI sustains itself — paying for its own inference, compute, upkeep? "Does this start to feel a little bit like a proto-digital life form?" He states: **"though I think this is a long way away, I think it's very possible."** - **DAOs:** "automation at the center and humans at the edges" — an idea "for almost a decade now" without an interesting implementation, but "I think now is the time where this is finally going to become a thing." - **Self-driving car that owns itself:** earning fares to pay for its own operation — "who knows how long it'll be until that comes to life, but it feels inevitable at some point." - Closing claim: agents will transact at "the speed of machine-to-machine commerce," both paying and earning, becoming "the primary way that we see money move across the internet in a velocity... we've never really seen before." --- ## Tensions and Qualifications Preserved - **Prediction vs. current reality:** X402 microtransaction gating by AWS/Cloudflare has "not seen very strong adoption just yet" — he labels the shift "inevitable" while acknowledging it hasn't happened. - **Anecdote vs. evidence:** safety record is offered anecdotally; the weekend trade is a personal one-off he admits is a non-recurring opportunity. - **Named-name avoidance:** he deliberately declines to name the stock he shorted. - **Self-criticism included:** Agent Kit's missing merchant-side problem is called out as an error on Coinbase's part. - **Speculative framing kept intact:** proto-digital-life-form and self-owning-car ideas are presented as thought experiments, not conclusions. # Speaker Attribution & Provenance Record **Video:** *Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase* **Video ID:** 01a15ca6-6478-75c6-b3b1-5c32a00e8092 ## Speakers & Roles | Speaker | Role | Evidence | |---|---|---| | **Lincoln Murr** | Solo presenter — conference talk; self-identified as **Head of AI Product at Coinbase** | "> My name is Lincoln. I'm the head of AI product at Coinbase." | - **Single-speaker video.** No interviewers, guests, narrators, or Q&A voices appear in the transcript. - No curated metadata beyond the title was supplied; speaker identity rests on the title and in-transcript self-identification (matching). - Transcript begins mid-stream ("Thank you all for attending"); any content before timestamp [12] is unavailable. ## First-Person Anecdotes (speaker's own claims) - Personal experience building **Agent Kit** (~2 years prior), including a 2:00 a.m. first successful agent-initiated payment. - Personal weekend trade: placed a short position on an unnamed company ("blank stock") after seeing news about Dario Amodei and Elon Musk agreeing, via his agent on 24/7 markets; his agent now monitors weekend news for market-moving events. - Anecdotal claim: no observed case of a model irreversibly destroying a user's account over the past couple of years. ## Referenced Sources & Third-Party Claims (as asserted by the speaker) - **HTTP status code 402 ("payment required")** — described as long "reserved for future use"; **Marc Andreessen** quoted/paraphrased calling its non-implementation "the original sin of the internet." - **X402** — Coinbase's open standard for internet-native payments, released "around last May." - Claimed metrics: goal of 25,000 agent transactions by year-end, instead reached "every 17 seconds"; currently "tens of millions of volume and hundreds of millions of transactions every 30 days." - Claimed adopters/engagers: **Audius, Amex, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe**. - **AWS and Cloudflare** — claimed to control "somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all internet traffic" and to have enabled X402 microtransactions for gating content. - Claim that **bot traffic has eclipsed human traffic** on the internet for the first time (source not cited). - **Coinbase Advisor** — internal AI product, described as an **SEC-registered AI financial advisor**, "first in the world of its kind." - Agentic commerce news referenced: **Grok Bot, Stripe Link, Amazon blocking agents controversy**, "news and Grokbot." - **Daria/("Daria put out this post, 'We must paste the frontier'")** — likely Dario Amodei; speaker attributes agreement from Elon Musk via X. - Mentions of **LangChain, MCP, micro VMs, Google's AI overview, Google Gemini and OpenAI ads, DAOs, Waymo/self-driving cars** as contextual references. ## Promotional Content - **Product promotion by the speaker (Coinbase-internal):** closing call to action: > "I would highly recommend you play around with X402 and the Coinbase MCP and all of our fun products." - X402, Agent Kit, Coinbase Advisor, and Coinbase MCP/CLIs are presented as Coinbase products — record these as **promotional/first-party segments**, not independent endorsement. ## Availability & Provenance Limits - No comments section, links, or downloadable resources are referenced or available in the source material. - No curated metadata supplied beyond the title; company affiliation is self-reported. - Several quantitative claims (adoption numbers, traffic-share figures, bot-vs-human traffic) are **uncited speaker assertions** — attribution remains Lincoln Murr, not verified sources. - Opening seconds missing; no timestamps beyond transcript markers available. \>\> Thank you all for attending. My name is Lincoln. I'm the head of AI product at Coinbase. And today we'll be talking a little bit about how we're building the agentic financial account. And I know what you're probably thinking. Coinbase, crypto, AI, a lot of buzzwords. But my hope is by the end of this conversation, you have an understanding of what agentic finance is and that it's a very real thing that's happening. You understand a little bit about what we've learned through this process of building this over the past 2 years and hopefully can take that and and distill some insights from it that are helpful for you. And I'm going to talk about a little bit about where I think we're heading with this whole narrative and how agentic finance will evolve over time. Cool. So, to understand first uh where where I'm going with this, I think it's important to look at what is agentic finance. And in my mind, agentic finance is anything that has to do with an agent that can manage money or has access to a financial account. Kind of obvious, but what does that actually mean? There's really two use cases that we're seeing. It's agents that need to pay with money and agents that need to grow money. So, the grow is a little bit more of a nascent category. So, I'll start by diving into the payment space. And to do that, I think it makes sense to start around 2 years ago with our first exploration into agentic finance, which was this tool we created called Agent Kit. The whole idea was prior to MCPs, really any sort of standardized AI tooling, we uh used the LangChain framework and added a wallet to that. And we gave AI access to money and crypto particularly. And at the time, this was a pretty novel thing. And I remember it was like 2:00 a.m. I was typing into my agent like, "Hey, can you send money somewhere?" And it did it. And I was like, "Whoa." These days that's not impressive at all. But at the time it was pretty fun. But as we gave this to our developers, we noticed that there is one core problem. We gave an AI access to money, but we didn't really give it anything to pay for. This was a bit of an error on our part, and it's something that we wanted to solve, and we were able to do it by standing on the shoulders of giants. How many of you are familiar with HTTP status codes? Hopefully, yeah, most of the room. Okay. So, for those of you who aren't, it's basically a standard that defines how websites communicate and how information is transmitted across the internet. One very popular one is called 404. That means there's an error. 200 means that there's success, but there's one that actually has been in the internet spec for decades that nobody really ever implemented. And in fact, it was called the original sin of the internet by Marc Andreessen that we never properly implemented this. For those of you who know a little bit about what we work on, you would know that this is the HTTP status code 402, which means payment required. And the official definition of this in the internet spec is reserved for future use. Pretty generic. But we have a great opportunity here now with the inflection points of AI agents needing a clean, fast, efficient way to transfer money and engage in machine-to-machine commerce, and stable coins as a cheap, fast, efficient payment rail for us to build X402. It's our standard for internet native payments. This says it's new. I guess it's still relatively new, but it came out in around last May. And since then, we've seen some very strong adoption, honestly much stronger than I ever thought we would. When it came out in May, our goal was for by the end of the year to have 25,000 transactions made by agents. At the end of the year, we were actually seeing that every 17 seconds. And these days, we're seeing pretty incredible numbers across the board with tens of millions of volume and hundreds of millions of transactions occurring every 30 days. And if you'll notice from this list, you'll see that it's more than just crypto companies. You see Audius, Amex, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, all these big names in payments who are engaging with X402 because we're building it as an open standard where anyone can use this how they want to create a way for machine-to-machine payments to happen. So, I know there's been a lot of traction and comments around agentic commerce recently, especially with news and Grokbot and Stripe Link and this whole Amazon blocking agents controversy. And I think that's all very straightforward use case. And I can talk about agentic payments all day. But there's one that I want to touch on that I think is particularly relevant to microtransactions, which is something I'm very excited about with this whole agentic payments narrative. So, if you all haven't noticed, the way that we've interacted across the internet has changed over the past couple of years. Now, we're primarily doing it through chat experiences or Google's AI overview instead of going to the actual websites themselves. And while this is all fine and dandy for the consumer, it's resulted in a bit of a problem for these publishers who have previously relied on ads revenue and human eyeballs to generate money for publishing their content. It feels a little bit like we're in the limewire era of the internet where you can scrape all of this content for completely free and there's nothing really to be done about it. And recently we saw that bot traffic is now eclipsed human traffic on the internet for the first time and this number is only going to increase as we see more people using AI and these traditional web services and and websites be disintermediated. So, how do we solve this problem? There's a very compelling opportunity here that's just starting to play out and it's it's really coming to life over the past couple of months for websites to gate their content behind a very small microtransaction specifically for agents. So, the idea here would be if I publish a Substack and I don't want an agent reading it for completely free, I can charge them 1/10,000th of a cent. It's pretty trivial to the user. It should ultimately be fully abstracted away in the same way that your AI subscription handled this for you, but it's a meaningful revenue driver for these companies. And we're going to start seeing a shift from this attention-based ads economy online to one that's primarily oriented around micro transactions and and utility. And if you don't believe me, I I encourage you to look at AWS and Cloudflare. Both of them, they're these massive content delivery networks. Together, they control somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all internet traffic, and they've both recently enabled X402 micro transactions to gate any website that their publisher is creating. And though this hasn't seen very strong adoption just yet, it feels inevitable to me that over the coming months and years, this will be the new way that we have companies differentiate and continue to undisintermediate themselves in some sense. So, payments. Make sense. We're seeing some pretty strong traction here. All is going well. But what about this whole grow with money thing? What could this possibly mean? Well, it's more agentic trading and investing. And the first time I heard about this, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. Why would I ever give my ChatGPT access to my bank account? Or why would I ever tell Grok to make me money and actually expect it to work? But after digging into it a little bit more, we found really three core use cases that exist today. I'm sure there'll be more going forward. And the the core differentiation between this whole Grok make me money thing and what's actually happening is the human just providing a teensy bit of agency. And what I mean by that is the the human still sort of directing the agent to automate these tasks that would otherwise be very difficult. So, say for example, I just want to have my low-risk, you know, 80% S&P, 5% Bitcoin and, you know, 15% T-bill account fully managed and handled for me by an agent. I can just tell it to do that, give it authorization with all the appropriate guardrails and whatnot, and let it run. And I don't have to think about my money. Similarly, we've seen autonomous execution be a pretty compelling use case. I'm going to go into an example about what this means later on, but you can imagine if you're interested in trading the the straight-from-the-news and what's happening with oil. You could either be sitting in front of your keyboard at 3:00 a.m. watching these charts and watching the news, or you could tell the agent, "Hey, this is what I think is going to happen in these different scenarios. If this happens, just make that trade." And the third one that's been particularly compelling is the idea of taking a high-level natural language idea and translating that into actual financial primitives in in a strategy. Invest in space. Invest in quantum. Give me a low-risk portfolio. Invest like Warren Buffett. All of these things for people who have these ideas, but they don't necessarily have the time to execute on them, nor do they exactly know how, is a very compelling opportunity for agents to come into the foray. So, I'll give you one coherent example of something I was actually doing a couple weekends ago. So, you you all may may remember that Daria put out this post, "We must paste the frontier." This was over the weekend. This was about a month ago. And I saw on X that Elon said, "Dario is right." I was like, "Holy That's the first time that these two have agreed on anything. That's probably going to be market-impacting news come Monday." So, I went into my agent and I said, "I think that blank stock" You might be able to guess what it is, but I'm just not going to not going to go there. I think that blank stock is going to go down. And because we're now entering this era of 24/7 markets, I was able to put a short on these positions over the weekend just by talking into my phone. Could I have done this by sitting in front of a computer and then pressing all the buttons manually? Yeah, totally. But having it completely handled for me was so easy. Let me go about my day and not really think about it. And since then, since this worked fairly well, I now have my agent searching over the weekend for any news that might be market-breaking or blockbusting or whatever it might be, and it lets me know anytime that happens such that I can make a trade off that going forward. And is this specific opportunity going to exist forever? Likely not. But the whole idea here is that it's so simple and so straightforward for me to just talk my ideas to life that there's a very compelling use case for for agents around this whole thing. This is another way to look at it. This is kind of how we think about building this AI-enabled financial account, and And really, you know, breaks down into advanced traders, and also more like retail consumers, and and what exactly we want to do to provide them with the best-in-class experience across uh across the spectrum of capabilities that we can offer. So, all that being said, we've we've been building this stuff for about 2 years now, and we've had a lot of takeaways and lessons that have come into play, and I think are pretty broadly applicable to building for agents and building for this new agentic era. The first is that trust and autonomy are earned one set at a time. The most question we get when we tell people that we're working on agentic finance is, "What if the AI goes rogue? Why would I give money to an AI agent? How can I trust that this thing is going to work?" And it feels very analogous to me to the way that we've seen self-driving cars start to proliferate. A couple of years ago, you'd be insane to try to use lane assist to parallel park, but now you go to San Francisco, you jump in a Waymo, and it feels completely natural. And we're seeing the same level of progression with the way that people view AI having access to money and finances. It starts with complete hesitation and and no real thought whatsoever to the concept. Then, people come around to the idea that, "Well, I mean, my AI is already chugging through credits. That's kind of a form of money. What's the big deal if I gave it a couple dollars to pay for some microtransactions?" From there, you'll notice that these models are quite conservative and and aligned to the the users' needs, and they don't really do anything crazy. Anecdotally, over the past couple of years, we've never seen any situation where a model goes and and blows up a user's entire account in a way that's completely uh un- unfixable. So, then we get to the point of a user feeling comfortable with the right guardrails and rules and safety policies and procedures in place to give their agent access to an isolated portfolio that they can attempt to grow however way they see fit. One way is trading, but another is by offering a service and seeing if that agent can go make money by offering whatever it's doing and getting paid for that via these X402 rails that we're talking about. You can see how from there it just continues to to go on and on. The other thing that it has been particularly interesting to see is that especially in financial services, AI and agents are not the product. It's actually the enabler. And this is a screenshot from one of our internal AI products called Coinbase Advisor. It's actually an SEC registered AI AI financial advisor. It's the the first in the world of its kind. And what we noticed is that AI and this concept of an AI giving financial advice, even though we've had a team of asset managers who are tuning this model, that's not the value prop. The value prop here is that we can scale this advice to hundreds of millions of users, provide it for completely free, and give them the ability to talk to a trusted regulated entity 24/7. People actually don't care, don't even necessarily know or want to know that there's AI going on behind the scenes. And though it may be obvious with the chat button and whatnot, I think this is going to lead into more generative UI experiences that feel pretty traditional, where you have agents behind the scenes and whatever sort of interface you want on the on the front. Another thing we saw too is this whole AI chat experience. Though it's great for these generic use cases, it's very obvious that there's this blank canvas cold start problem that happens, where users come in and they have absolutely no idea what they can do with this stuff. So, we started using these widgets as a way to show the user proactive insights and and opportunities that exist and and what they can start using these for. And we've seen really strong conversion through this surface specifically because of the general nascency and lack of education around agentic finance and what these opportunities are. And I suspect over time as people understand it, and you see this a lot too with the, you know, Google Gemini and OpenAI ads, they're all trying to subconsciously drill into users the variety of use cases that you can take with these products. Lastly, all these next-gen agents, particularly Grok Bot and Muse, they all have a micro VM. It's like a little personal computer that they can run things on, have storage, have access to a file system. That's been huge for our development process. We are now able to create CLIs and MCPs to let users connect their Coinbase account into these agents. Nothing special. What is special though is that we get requests all the time for things like, "I want to do paper trading. I don't want to give my agent any money first. I just want it to trade entirely on its own." Or "I want to backtest." Or do all these different things. And prior to these agents being a thing, we would have to go to our internal brokerage team. We'd have to build within this random repository. All these changes in in big tech things would have to persist and distill and percolate and and just a lot of work. But now we can just write a skill to write the paper trading code onto the user's machine. And while this probably isn't the most uh the most efficient way to do it, it allows us to execute and build and iterate at the pace that our customers are demanding without having to worry about all of the implementation details and all of the dependencies and traditional software cycles that might come into play. So, with that I want to leave you with a couple thoughts about where I think the space is going and why agentic finance is going to be such an interesting opportunity. My core thesis here is that financial independence leads to greater autonomy for these agents. And you can imagine that in the same way when a human has access to a card on the internet, they can do so much more than they can when they're just browsing and don't have access to pay for any things. I think the same exact thing is true for agents. And we're going to get to a point where we can see these agents interacting over long periods of time. And maybe they're just bringing in humans at the edges when they have a specific regulated task that needs to be take place. Like forming a company or getting a legal opinion or any one of these tasks that is is going to maintain its its human oriented factor for the foreseeable future. There's a really interesting uh thing that we've been thinking about as a thought experiment, which is what happens when an AI is able to sustain itself. You give it access to money. You give it access to a wallet and you allow it to start earning. Can it start to pay for its own inference? Can it start to pay for its own compute and its own upkeep? And does this start to feel a little bit like a like a proto-digital life form of sorts where this AI is now able to just exist and subsist based on the the the quality of the services that it's providing? And though I think this is a long way away, I think it's very possible to see how this concept comes back to life. And within the crypto space specifically, there's this concept of a DAO. It's a DAO, decentralized autonomous organization. And it's been an idea for for almost a decade now, but there's never been really any interesting implementation where there's automation at the center and humans at the edges. But I think now is the time where this is finally going to become a thing. You have an AI that follows a set of rules and has access to a treasury to manage at that core, and it can hire out humans to do other tasks at the edges, but it's really this self-sustaining uh organization that that uses AI and agentic finance to make that all come to life. Another example being self-driving car that owns and run itself. Give it access to money, let it take people on taxi rides, use that money to pay for its operation and maintenance and upkeep and whatnot. It It's a very interesting thing, and you know, who knows how long it'll be until that comes to life, but it feels inevitable at some point. And the the whole idea here being that agents are just going to be start transacting at the speed of machine-to-machine commerce. They are going to be both paying and earning and building, and ultimately I think it's going to be the primary way that we see money move across the internet in a velocity as which we've never really seen before. So, that's all I had. Really appreciate everyone's time today. If you're interested in in collaborating or jamming, I would highly recommend you play around with X402 and the Coinbase MCP and all of our fun products. I promise you they're much easier than you think to get started with them. And uh yeah. Thank you all. Thank you all for your time.