Coinbase (NASDAQ: $COIN ) is pushing its Base network deeper into AI payments with a new tool that lets agents interact with onchain apps from chat.
The company announced Base MCP on Tuesday, adding a Model Context Protocol server that connects a user’s Base Account to AI interfaces such as Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Cursor. Once installed, the tool lets users ask an agent to check balances, view transaction history, send funds, swap tokens and use supported Base apps.
The launch adds another layer to Coinbase’s broader effort to make Base a settlement and activity layer for agentic commerce. Base MCP arrives with skill plugins for Morpho, Moonwell, Aerodrome, Bankr, Avantis, Virtuals and Uniswap, giving agents access to lending markets, liquidity pools, swaps, perps and token activity across the Base ecosystem.
Coinbase is also tying the rollout to x402, its payment standard for small internet transactions. Together, MCP-style communication and x402 payments are meant to support a new category of commerce built around microtransactions for research, data and online services.
That market is still early. A recent Keyrock report put agent-based transactions at $73 million over the past year, a small figure compared with Visa’s $14.5 trillion in annual payment volume. The number shows how experimental the category remains, even as Coinbase, Stripe, Visa (NYSE: $V ) and Google (NASDAQ: $GOOGL ) continue building around AI-driven payments.
Base’s design keeps the user in the approval loop. The agent can prepare a transaction, but the Base Account opens separately so the user can review asset changes and approve or reject the request before anything moves onchain. The Base MCP server also does not hold or access private keys.
For Coinbase, the product extends a familiar strategy: make Base easier to use, pull more activity into the ecosystem and position crypto rails as infrastructure for AI-native payments.
Coinbase Global Inc. (NASDAQ: COIN) is currently trading at $184.8 U.S. per share.
