Why AI Agents Will Need Their Own Bank Accounts — Lincoln Murr, Coinbase
Coinbase is building financial accounts for AI agents to autonomously spend and manage money
“we gave AI access to money, but we didn't give it anything to pay for with it”
Coinbase's Lincoln Murr describes two years of building 'agentic finance' infrastructure, framing AI agents having their own financial accounts as an already-real and rapidly maturing category. He outlines two agent archetypes—those that spend money and those that grow it—and builds toward HTTP 402 (Payment Required), the decades-old dormant web standard Marc Andreessen called the 'original sin' of the internet, as the key primitive for machine-to-machine payments. This matters because autonomous agent payments represent a critical missing layer in the AI stack that crypto rails are now positioned to fill.