On July 26, Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong criticized the trend of crypto projects abandoning blockchain in favor of AI.
“If you’re in crypto, pivot to AI.”
I used to hear versions of this, and it’s the wrong way to think about the world. It’s zero sum, scarcity thinking.
Crypto is a general purpose technology. It’s infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It…
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) July 26, 2026
He called the idea of “moving from crypto to AI” a mistake and an example of zero-sum thinking. According to Armstrong, distributed ledger technology is a general-purpose technology comparable to electricity and the internet. Blockchain doesn’t need to compete with new trends, as it will be the foundation for future products, the Coinbase CEO believes.
“It’s ‘and,’ not ‘or.’ The fact that AI has become a megatrend doesn’t diminish the role of cryptocurrencies. Rather, it makes them even more significant,” he wrote.
Agents and Money
Armstrong estimates that autonomous AI agents will increasingly conduct daily transactions, trade, act as advisors, raise funds for new projects, and handle tasks like tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill payments.
The traditional financial system won’t suffice: digital assistants can’t open bank accounts and wait days for transfers. Programmable real-time funds, i.e., cryptocurrencies, are needed.
Tory Green, CEO of io.net, agreed with Armstrong that agents need not just money, but money that moves at machine speed. According to him, the financial stack has evolved around humans for decades, and now cryptocurrencies will be the first infrastructure element to adapt to agents.
agents don’t just need money but they need money that moves at machine speed. our whole financial stack has evolved for human interface. money’s just the first rail that has to catch up. same story coming for compute, data, all of it.
— Tory | io.net 🦾 (@MTorygreen) July 27, 2026
Coinbase is actively developing agent-based finance (AiFi) using the x402 protocol, the Base blockchain, and Circle’s USDC stablecoin. According to the exchange’s head, these tools currently facilitate the majority of agent payments in the industry.
In June, the trading platform launched the Coinbase for Agents service, which connects AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to user accounts for trading and other operations within set limits. In mid-July, the platform also enabled Coinbase Business clients to receive payments from digital agents via x402.
Skepticism and Warnings
An April article by The Wall Street Journal compared such corporate shifts to AI with the dot-com boom of the early 2000s and the blockchain hype of 2017. According to the publication, adding trendy buzzwords to a company’s name typically boosts its stock by over 50% in the short term, often reflecting trends rather than real structural business changes.
The NeoSoul AI project team countered Armstrong, noting that granting capital to an agent without a usage history is risky. Developers believe that the transition from agent payments to a full-fledged AiFi economy lacks reputation and memory. Trusting crypto wallets to a “blank slate” could be dangerous, they argue.
In March, a16z venture partner Noah Levin stated that the actual transaction volume of AI agents was 15 times lower than Bloomberg’s estimates.
