Autonomous AI “agents” will transact using crypto in the future, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argued in an interview with Decrypt.
“There are going to be more and more AI agents in the future, which are essentially bots that are trying to perform various tasks out there in the world,” Armstrong said.
Those agents will need to transact in order to pay for services like information and API calls, he added. “It's hard to imagine a world where different AI agents are paying each other with Visa, or something like that,” Armstrong said, adding that they will likely use “a digitally native currency like crypto.”
Armstrong also suggested that the “intersection of where AI and crypto may come together” could throw up other use cases, such as establishing the provenance of information.
“In the world of fake information out there being generated by LLMs, or images or videos of people that can spread virally, even if it's not real, I think crypto has a role to play there,” Armstrong said. Video, images and articles could be cryptographically signed to publishers’ ENS handles, he suggested, verifying that they came from an authentic source such as a recognized author or news organization.
Coinbase CEO: We Asked the SEC for Feedback, All We Got Was a Lawsuit
San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is under fire from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, despite the company’s attempts to seek clarity from the regulator, according to CEO Brian Armstrong. In an exclusive interview with Decrypt, Armstrong said Coinbase has met with the SEC 30 times over the last 18 months. "We haven't really gotten any feedback from them about which assets they believe are securities and which they believe are not," he said, "other than Bitcoin.” Cit...
Coinbase is already using AI tools, Armstrong said, in areas such as fraud prevention, customer support and other backend services. “We use things like Copilot, which is assisting our developers in writing code,” he said, adding that Coinbase engineers report that it’s saving them an average of an hour a day.
AI, he said, has a variety of potential uses including, “user interface design and even some forecasting; from a financial point of view FP&A functions could integrate this.”
The future of crypto
Armstrong also highlighted some areas of crypto that Coinbase expects to bear fruit in the coming year, including payments. “We've seen a couple of enabling technologies come together—stablecoins, layer-2 solutions like Base—that I think are going to make payments more and more viable,” he said, pointing to “sparks” of activity in emerging markets such as Africa.
Decentralized social media is also “exciting,” said Armstrong. “Now that we have decentralized identity, with ENS, we can start to build a follower graph,” he said. “You can start to have every post that someone might make, whether that’s text, or images or video, be an NFT, essentially.”
A number of decentralized social media projects have launched in the past year amid the well-publicized struggles of legacy platform Twitter, including Bluesky, Nostr, Friend.tech and Lens Protocol.
Decentralized Twitter Alternatives Bluesky and Nostr Are Growing, With Some Growing Pains
Bluesky and Nostr—two separate Twitter-like social platforms, both decentralized, and both backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey—are growing rapidly as Elon Musk continues to make controversial changes to Twitter itself. Bluesky released its long-awaited app for Android smartphones on Friday, almost two months after its iOS client went live on the Apple App Store. (The web client is still in pre-beta.) Bluesky access is still invite-only, but the growth of its user base is accelerating from ab...
Stablecoins, DeFi and NFTs have “a long way to go,” but can “help push crypto into the next wave of adoption,” alongside payments and decentralized social media, Armstrong said. “Each of those already has tens of billions of dollars locked up in them, so they're not brand new. But you know, how do we get that to be 100 million or a billion people using it every day?”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
