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Coinbase exec says AI agents are using x402 to pay services
The agent workflow Coinbase product leader Lincoln Murr described included scraping content with Firecrawl and delivering it via Stable Upload after Twitter blocked access.
CryptoSlate reports that Lincoln Murr, who leads AI product work at Coinbase, described how AI agents are starting to pay third-party services on their own using x402, an open payment standard designed for software to settle for access when it needs it.
In the example Murr shared, his agent copied Twitter articles to his Kindle: it scraped the content with Firecrawl after Twitter began blocking it, then uploaded the results through Stable Upload so they could reach his email. Murr said he had forgotten the agent even had a crypto wallet, and that the workflow completed without his ongoing approval.
He said a pattern is emerging where agents given a high-level task can “shop” for the capabilities they need during execution, weighing factors like cost, quality, and response time. Murr described this as moving away from a model built on pre-funded accounts and API key signups, toward one where the wallet can function as both an agent identifier and its payment method.
CryptoSlate also noted that an x402 Foundation was launched by the Linux Foundation in April, with Coinbase contributing the original protocol and early backers including AWS, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Shopify, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare. Coinbase's Bazaar indexes more than 10,000 paid tools for agents to search and call, and CryptoSlate said AWS and Cloudflare have added features that let protected content requests be priced and paid for at the network edge.