Original title: "AI gives AI coins? Interpretation of Coinbase's first AI-powered cryptocurrency transaction"

Original author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

On the last day of August, Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong brought the latest blockbuster news to the cryptocurrency industry - "At @CoinbaseDev, we witnessed the first AI-to-AI cryptocurrency transaction." After experiencing the "AI industry explosion moment" brought by ChatGPT, many people couldn't help but exclaimed when they saw this news: Is the cryptocurrency industry about to usher in "AI trading players"? "Can AI also trade coins?" "Will there be no retail investors in the cryptocurrency industry in the future?"

Odaily Planet Daily will briefly interpret and analyze the event of Coinbase facilitating the first AI-powered cryptocurrency transaction and the changes that may occur in the industry as a result.

Coinbase is serious about deploying AI agent transactions

On August 31, Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong rarely published a long article on the X platform titled "AI is using cryptocurrency to pay for other AI products".

The article begins by saying, “This week at @CoinbaseDev, we witnessed the first AI-to-AI crypto transaction.”

He then explains, “What did one AI buy from another AI? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI Tokens (basically resources from one LLM to another, Odaily Planet Daily Note: It can be understood as a unit of measurement for AI computing power consumption, such as the API interface usage of large language models such as OpenAI also uses Tokens as the unit of calculation). They use tokens to buy tokens. Although AI agents cannot get bank accounts, they can get crypto wallets. Now, AI agents can use USDC on the Base network to trade with humans, merchants, or other AIs. These transactions are instant, global, and free.”

After that, he further elaborated on the current status of AI agent development and the current dilemma.

"This is an important step for artificial intelligence to complete effective work. Today, if you give an AI agent a task and come back a few days or hours later, it may not be able to complete effective work. To some extent, this is the limitation of the technology itself, and products such as devin.ai are gradually approaching to solve this problem. But another reason is that AI cannot trade to obtain the resources they need. They don't have credit cards to use AWS (Odaily Note: Amazon Cloud Service), Github or Vercel (and other technical platforms and tools). They don't have a way to pay to book your upcoming travel-related flight tickets or hotels. They also can't break through the paywall (such as reading academic articles), promote their posts on platform X through paid advertising, or use the growing network of paid APIs to integrate the data they need."

Finally, Brian called on developers to integrate Coinbase's MPC wallet if they are engaged in payment-related large language models or AI models, and expressed optimism about the broad prospects of the AI economy.

He mentioned: "If you are developing an LLM or AI model with a crypto wallet integration for payment, please try integrating our MPC wallet from the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP). If you are a company providing services, please prepare AI checkout for your shopping cart. It turns out that everyone will benefit from access to quality financial services, including AI. (Imagine) How big will the economic market between AI and AI be in a few years?"

It is worth mentioning that Brian used "They" many times in the long article to refer to AI agents, which may mean that AI that can trade and pay with the help of cryptocurrencies has a certain "personalized operating ability".

Not only that, just yesterday, Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth also posted: "We are building an SDK that gives bot/AI agents the following functions:

· Send USDC for free;

· Trade cryptocurrencies;

· Bet on prediction markets;

· Pledge ETH, SOL, etc.;

· Convert between fiat and cryptocurrencies;

· Deploy/create NFTs;

· Cross-L2 bridge.

If you are interested in this, please contact me. ”

It can be seen that Coinbase is not just talking about empowering AI agents to handle cryptocurrency transactions, but is making drastic efforts to carry out development research and implementation in related fields.

If it can be achieved, perhaps AI agents will become one of the important roles in the cryptocurrency market in the future. After all, compared with human traders, the amount of data that AI agents can handle, transaction efficiency, and transaction accuracy may usher in exponential growth.

In addition, from the news about wallets previously released by Jesse Pollak, head of the Base protocol, we can also get a glimpse of Coinbase's layout in terms of payment entry.

On August 13, Jesse posted: "I have outlined my 'dream wallet', which will be 10 times better than any current Web2 or on-chain wallet. We need to solve a series of difficult challenges, but I think we can achieve this goal in the next 6 to 12 months. Onchain will be 100 times better than online."

On August 26, Jesse quoted the previous tweet about the on-chain shopping operation and posted again, "It's just a small thing - but I checked out with my smart wallet, and the store automatically merged the USDC approval and withdrawal into one transaction. It may have been two approvals before, one of which was meaningless to most ordinary users. Take it slow, but it will definitely come true."

The operation interface released by Jesse

Combined with Base Judging from the rapid development of the network this year, Coinbase's layout for AI agent crypto trading can be said to be step by step:

· The foundation is the Base network. Its main function is to provide a stable operating ecological environment and provide a fertile ground for the development of many developers and ecological applications;

· The tool is the smart wallet. On the one hand, Web2 users and massive funds can flow into Coinbase and the Base ecosystem; on the other hand, it provides a direct trading channel and trading environment for the operation of AI agents.

· The result is ecological applications. In the future, social applications including Farcaster Protocol, on-chain stores including Onchain Store, and consumer applications including BlackBird are expected to achieve "one-step" fool-style operation with the help of AI agents.

It can be said that the application direction of AI agents in the cryptocurrency industry is extremely broad, covering staking, betting, games, socializing, creation, and even more life scenarios such as food, clothing, housing, and transportation.

Of course, at the intersection of AI agents and cryptocurrency, Coinbase is not the only one that has laid out this field. Stablecoin issuer Circle has also started its own "territory layout".

Circle CEO: USDC will become the preferred stablecoin network for AI agent projects

In August, Skyfire, founded by former Ripple executives, announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round of financing to provide encrypted payment solutions for AI agents. Investors include USDC issuers Circle, Ripple, Gemini, and the venture capital firm of Tim Draper, a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire and Bitcoin advocate.

The company has developed an open source payment system that allows autonomous AI agents to conduct various transactions on the Internet, including the purchase of data storage, creative assets, air tickets, and daily necessities. Its payment network runs on the USDC stablecoin and is currently deployed on the Polygon network, with plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.

Skyfire co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi said, "Traditional payment systems cannot meet the needs of AI, and cryptocurrencies and blockchains provide 24/7 micro-transactions, low fees and high efficiency solutions. The company has worked with a number of customers, including parts manufacturers and AI infrastructure providers for Indian auto service centers, and is negotiating with multiple large language models (LLMs) to adopt USDC-based AI agent payment solutions."

On August 21, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said that USDC will become the preferred stablecoin network for AI agent projects. Circle has previously participated in the Skyfire project in this field, aiming to further promote the arrival of the era of on-chain machine-to-machine economic activities.

As the second largest stablecoin with a total circulation of up to 34.6 billion US dollars, USDC's application in the cryptocurrency industry is second only to the stablecoin USDT issued by stablecoin issuer Tether. As AI agents are developing rapidly today, USDC may continue to play the role of "AI economic blood" in the future, just like the role of liquidity carrier it plays in the cryptocurrency industry.

Summary: AI economic market may become the mainstream of future market economy

In the comment section of Brian’s long article, Bitcoin Sage, co-founder of Delpin Labs, commented: “The AI-to-AI economy has already emerged and will exceed humanity’s wildest expectations. This transaction is the first domino in a chain reaction that will change the entire financial landscape, which means that, on the one hand, AI can access resources and services without humans as gatekeepers. This is rocket fuel for their capabilities; on the other hand, we are not just automating existing jobs, we are creating entirely new forms of value creation and exchange. For crypto-native users, this opens up incredible possibilities: personal assistants become the main entry point for interacting with crypto/blockchain; ultra-efficient arbitrage, market making across multiple protocols; on-chain data analysis with unprecedented depth and speed; everyone, even those who can’t code, has algorithmic trading capabilities. The fusion of AI and encryption is not just another technological trend, it’s the foundation of a whole new economic era. AI Robots are not only participating in the economy, they will also drive the economy into the next era. The question is not whether it will happen, but how fast it will happen and how prepared we will be? Whether from a personal, financial or business perspective. "

Of course, there are many people who are concerned about the risks and hidden dangers that may be brought about by AI-agent crypto transactions, and even the far-reaching impact of a series of changes such as taxation and employment on society.

But in any case, the future is here, and all we can do is either to throw ourselves into it and actively embrace the era; or to cling to the old and wait to be eliminated by the times.

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