Coinbase Doubles Down: How Stablecoins and AI Are Reshaping Global E-Commerce by 2025
Forget 'crypto winter'—Coinbase is heating up the payments race with a one-two punch of stablecoins and AI. The exchange-turned-infrastructure-player just placed its biggest bet yet on the future of borderless commerce.
The play? Leverage dollar-pegged tokens to bypass banking bottlenecks while deploying machine learning to slash fraud. Early adopters report settlement times dropping from days to seconds—and Wall Street's legacy rails are sweating.
But here's the kicker: this isn't just about faster checkout flows. The real endgame? A seismic power shift from financial middlemen to algorithmic market makers. (Take that, 3% credit card fees.)
Of course, skeptics whisper this is just another 'web3 moonshot' from a company desperate to diversify from trading revenue. But with cross-border transactions hitting $156 trillion annually—and fraud losses ballooning to $48 billion—the math might finally be tipping in crypto's favor.
One thing's certain: when the suits in Delaware start talking about 'disrupting SWIFT,' you know the financial revolution won't be televised—it'll be tokenized.
Money that works like machines do
Aggarwal is also thinking beyond people toward bots. In an interview with crypto.news, he outlined how Coinbase is building infrastructure for artificial intelligence-native apps and agents that can autonomously manage money.
“We believe that stablecoins are the native payment rails for AI agents,” Aggarwal said, adding that “every AI agent should have a wallet and be able to hold, send, and receive stablecoins like USDC, which is why we’re building the financial infrastructure for AI-native apps and agents.”
“Stablecoins are becoming the go-to currency for agentic commerce,” he said, noting that “AI agents need money that works like they do: programmable, 24/7, and built for the internet.” With these tools in place, Coinbase envisions a “new kind of economy where bots and agents can transact, move funds, and make decisions on their own,” he explained.
What’s next: building the rails for the machine economy
Aggarwal says Coinbase is “actively exploring the intersection of crypto and AI,” including integrating AI across its own ecosystem. The company sees “massive potential to unlock new use cases and simplify how people (and agents) interact with the onchain world.” Some of those initiatives include:
- Making Coinbase the go-to platform for AI developers building systems that need to move money, whether human-to-agent or agent-to-agent.
- Offering a development platform via the Coinbase Developer Platform.
- Backing the next wave of crypto x AI startups through Coinbase Ventures, including companies like Payman, Vana, and Skyfire.
He also highlighted two recent launches underpinning this strategy:
- x402, which is a payment protocol enabling stablecoin payments over HTTP.
- AgentKit, which allows developers to build AI agents capable of autonomous blockchain interaction.
Beyond crypto-native audiences
While much of the stablecoin conversation has lived in crypto circles, Aggarwal believes the real impact will be global and deeply practical, especially in places where financial infrastructure is weak or exclusionary.
“Stablecoins are critical to our mission of increasing economic freedom,” Aggarwal wrote in the X post, describing them as key to unlocking “more open, fair, free, and transparent financial services (DeFi) globally, unencumbered by legacy financial systems.”
That includes helping small, cash-based businesses go digital and enabling faster, automated payments through AI agents, two trends that could accelerate adoption globally.
By 2030, Aggarwal expects stablecoins to be nearly ubiquitous. “Every person and business who uses the internet (and a huge contingent of those who currently don’t) will interact with stablecoins,” he wrote, adding in a commentary for crypto.news that the exchange is “actively exploring the intersection of crypto and AI, including by integrating AI across the Coinbase ecosystem.”
