Coinbase CEO refutes the idea that crypto should be used for AI: Digital currency is the universal infrastructure that supports AI

Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong said that AI agents need their own financial infrastructure. Crypto is not competing with AI; it is the underlying architecture that powers AI.
（Background: Coinbase CEO on the 8 major upgrades in future finance）
（Context: the top 10 tracks the Coinbase CEO is bullish on）

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• Crypto is infrastructure, not a track
• What kind of financial infrastructure do AI agents need?
• The Agent Finance (AiFi) era has arrived

Today, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong pushed back on the idea that crypto players should switch to AI, saying crypto and artificial intelligence are not competing with each other, but instead complement each other—no either-or choice.

In his post, Armstrong emphasized that crypto is a general purpose technology, with a status similar to electricity or the internet. It won’t compete with the next hot trend because it is itself the supporting structure for that trend. He described this way of thinking as zero-sum, scarcity thinking—arguing that while AI is becoming a major trend, it hasn’t weakened crypto; instead, it makes crypto more important.

What kind of financial infrastructure do AI agents need?

Armstrong listed the financial capabilities AI agents will need in the future:

No account opening: AI agents cannot open bank accounts like humans, wait three days for transfers, or be constrained by a single country’s jurisdiction. What they need is money that is immediate and programmable.

Autonomous payments and capital management: Agents need to hold funds, pay expenses on their own, participate in transactions, and even act as financial advisors. They will raise funds or take part in lending for ongoing new projects, and they will also handle the messy details for users, such as tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill payments.

"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

The Agent Finance (AiFi) era has arrived

Armstrong named this emerging field Agentic Finance, or AiFi for short. He said that Coinbase has already gotten a head start by using the x402 protocol, the Base layer, and the secondary-dollar stablecoin USDC. These protocols are already supporting the infrastructure for the vast majority of agent payments.

In other words, today multiple AI-related developments are pushing this trend forward: Nvidia is providing $250 billion in financial guarantees to support a 10-gigawatt data center project in Ohio, and US lawmakers have also introduced an AI emergency shutdown bill requiring AI systems to retain the technical ability to be shut down. AI’s scale expansion is accelerating, while the underlying financial rails are crypto.

Armstrong’s argument can be boiled down to one sentence: AI agents won’t use banks—they can only use crypto.

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