Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong argued crypto and AI are complementary, not competing, as AI agents need programmable money and real-time settlement.
Alpha Score of 38 reflects weak overall profile with weak momentum, weak value, poor quality, strong sentiment.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back against crypto firms that have shifted focus to artificial intelligence, arguing the two technologies complement each other rather than compete.
"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," Armstrong wrote Sunday on X. "Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn't compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It's an and, not an or."
Armstrong said AI being a "megatrend" does not detract from crypto but adds to its importance. He argued that AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will eventually transact far more each day than all humans combined.
"They can't open a bank account, they can't wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country. They need real time programmable money (and that's crypto)," he wrote.
Armstrong noted Coinbase's involvement in x402, an agentic protocol that he said now powers most agentic payments. The protocol revives the long-unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code and turns it into a payment protocol for the internet. PYMNTS reported that for CFOs, the more immediate question is whether software usage, data calls, model inference and machine-to-machine work can become payable events inside normal business operations.
"The x402 protocol revives the long-unused HTTP 402 'Payment Required' status code and turns it into a payment protocol for the internet. That matters because the object being sold is not necessarily a product. It may be a request, an answer, a data pull, a support escalation, a chunk of compute, or a software action. The request becomes the transaction," PYMNTS said.
Armstrong added that AI agents will also engage in trading, act as financial advisors, and raise or borrow money for new projects. "They will eliminate tasks for us around tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill pay," he said.
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