Coinbase exchange announced on February 11th this year the launch of Agentic Wallets, a wallet infrastructure designed to allow artificial intelligence (AI) agents to hold and manage cryptocurrency funds without direct human intervention.
According to the exchange’s development team, this tool enables these systems Spending, receiving payments, and performing transaction operations Voluntarily. You can also include programmable spending limits and compliance filters.
This new wallet allows AI agents to sign transactions on Base, Ethereum’s second layer (L2) network created by Coinbase. without paying network feesprevents agents from becoming inactive due to unpaid fees. The announcement mentioned that Agentic Wallet would work in a “multi-chain” operation, but did not specify which other networks it would work with.
In the operation of the new wallet, the x402 protocol presented by Coinbase last year will serve as the payment infrastructure that enables these agents. Settle transactions automatically, As reported by CriptoNoticias.
Possible risks of private keys
According to a statement from Coinbase, when it comes to private keys, You will remain logged in to your trusted execution environment (TEE) is an architecture that separates sensitive data from AI models and reduces the risk of leakage.
Although Coinbase presents the wallet as non-custodial (meaning the funds are not under the company’s direct control), its operation relies on the developer platform and its security and monitoring systems.
In practice, this means that the filter passes through Coinbase’s infrastructure while the agent retains cryptographic control over assets, operations, service continuity, and compliance. An additional dependency layer is introduced For users.
Although Coinbase describes the wallet as non-custodial, the private keys are stored in a TEE within the Coinbase infrastructure; Transaction signature relies on TEE managed by Coinbaseaccessed programmatically by an AI agent.
As a result, operational management relies on access to Coinbase’s environment, introducing additional technical dependencies even though the company does not directly manage the funds.
On the other hand, autonomy can also introduce new risk vectors. When an AI agent interprets external commands manipulated, e.g. By command injection attackunexpected transactions may occur.
In this context, programmable spending limits not only serve as operational rules; containment mechanism Prevent behavior caused by model errors or malicious data.
New potential applications, according to Coinbase
According to the statement, once agents are allowed to store and move money, the following use cases become possible: Previously required continuous human monitoring.
In the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, agents can: Monitor performance across protocols Automatically rebalance positions and execute trades 24 hours a day without manual intervention.
Additionally, Coinbase brings up the concept of a “machine economy.” Agents pay for their own resources Uses x402 protocol. This allows agents to automatically make payments for using programming interfaces (APIs), hiring cloud computing power, and accessing databases without human intervention for each payment. All of this is to keep it working.
According to Coinbase, this wallet will allow agents to charge fees for the content they produce. For example, generate payments to analyze market and trading signals and send those payments to other agents and people without manual intervention.
There are concrete signs of the growth of autonomous agents. An example is Ethereum’s ERC-8004 standard. AI agents register and verify each other on-chainwhich enables automatic interaction with trackable identities. Interest in this new technology was so high that just one day after the standard was announced, more than 15,000 applications were registered on the same day.