AI agents are the next wave in crypto payments, says Base developer

Jesse Pollak, a developer for Coinbase's Layer 1 chain Base, said that agentic payments—where AI can autonomously pay for services like data access, computing resources, and travel bookings—will become a key trend, CoinDesk reported. He highlighted the x402 protocol, an open-source payment protocol being co-developed by Coinbase, Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard that enables payments through simple API calls. Pollak added that to date, around $48 million in payments have been processed through the protocol, with approximately 95% of this volume occurring on the Base chain.