Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase

Lincoln Murr, head of AI product at Coinbase, explains agentic finance, covering agents that pay and agents that grow money. He traces the path from AgentKit, an early experiment giving an AI a wallet, to x402, an open payment standard built on the long-unused HTTP 402 code. He also discusses microtransactions as a replacement for the ad economy, agents executing trades from simple instructions, the trust-building lessons from two years of development, and the vision of agents that can pay for their own upkeep.