Coinbase Says Crypto's Next Wave of Growth Will Come From AI Agents. Here's What Crypto Investors Need to Know.

Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: COIN) is betting that crypto's next big growth wave will occur due to artificial intelligence agents transacting with each other and making their own agent-to-agent economy. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported that there had been more than 100 million agent payments on Coinbase's Base blockchain through the first quarter of 2026. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong claimed in late July that such agents will eventually out-transact all humans combined.

Aside from Base, the chains with the most real agent activity today are Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and Solana (CRYPTO: SOL). Here's what you need to know before you invest.

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Agentic payments are just getting started

While the term is quickly becoming a bit of a meaningless buzzword, "agentic payments" are essentially just money transfers that are initiated and confirmed by an AI agent without human intervention. Agentic commerce, a related term, refers to the economy of different agents finding services, comparing prices, and spending money, either on behalf of a human, or to serve their own goals (which may have been specified by a human or by another AI agent).

Coinbase is incentivized to promote the idea that agentic payments and agentic commerce are the future of cryptocurrency, as it helped to launch the x402 standard. That standard, which can be used by any website, creates a simple and machine-readable paywall for all sorts of online materials. When an agent encounters a resource that's gated by an x402 request, the server quotes it a price for accessing the resource, which the agent can then pay in stablecoins on-chain, and the request clears.

A draft Ethereum standard called ERC-8004, co-authored by contributors from the Ethereum Foundation and Coinbase, among others, will also help the agentic economy to grow. ERC-8004 is a standardized identity layer that gives every registered agent on its network an identity token and a public feedback record. Other chains have already adopted the standard, and more are likely to in the future.

So now there's a system that allows agents to buy things they need to do the work they want, and another system that enables the grading of that work and the tracking of the agent that did it.

The precursors to the agentic economy taking off are thus already in place.

How Ethereum and Solana are the most likely to benefit

For now, most agentic payments settle in stablecoins, and no single network has locked in the standard. Holders of Solana and Ethereum thus capture value through the transaction fees of the payments that are routed through their networks.

Yet agents don't have many other places to do business. Ethereum's decentralized finance (DeFi) asset footprint is $49 billion, and Solana's is near $6 billion. Both chains have vibrant ecosystems of financial services, many of which are increasingly open to access from agents.

Today, it's best to buy either of those two coins to get exposure to the growth of agentic commerce in crypto, rather than buying a token issued by an agent or a token that provides services for agents.

Solana and Ethereum have other irons in the fire, which gives them downside protection and more sources of upside. For a fairly speculative emerging segment like agentic commerce, that's the best combination to own.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool recommends Coinbase Global. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.