February 11, 2026, Coinbase announced the launch of Agentic Wallets, a wallet specifically designed for AI Agents.

What are Agentic Wallets?

Agentic Wallets aim to empower AI Agents with a fundamental capability required for their next evolution—independently holding and managing funds.

As early as November 2024, Coinbase had launched AgentKit, but there is an essential difference between AgentKit and Agentic Wallets. AgentKit was used to "embed" a wallet into an agent, requiring developers to perform custom integration. In contrast, Agentic Wallets are about "quickly equipping any agent with a wallet," making them more plug-and-play.

Simply put, the previous AgentKit was a toolkit provided to AI Agent developers, enabling the agents they created to have built-in wallet functionality. But now, in an era where everyone can quickly launch their own AI Agent, anyone can install a wallet for their agent by executing a few simple commands, just like adding a Skill to their agent. According to Coinbase, "it takes less than 2 minutes to set up."

Complex on-chain operations are abstracted by Coinbase into Skills that agents can install and execute with simple commands. Agentic Wallets enable agents to perform identity verification, send/receive funds, make payments, trade, earn yields (Yield Farming or LP), and more.

To prevent the excessive autonomy of AI Agents from rapidly depleting funds due to certain reasons, Agentic Wallets also provide programmable spending limits, including the maximum amount an agent can spend per session, the maximum limit per transaction, private key isolation protection, and screening to block high-risk transactions.

The supported assets are based on the Base chain. To ensure that agents active on Base are not interrupted due to insufficient gas fees, actions performed by agents on Base do not require gas fees.

Why is Coinbase doing this?

Coinbase's ambition is clear—to make the Agent economy happen on Base.

The longstanding dilemma for AI Agents has been that they can help analyze markets, provide investment decision suggestions, discover arbitrage opportunities, and more, but they lack identity, accounts, and wallets. Therefore, they can only offer suggestions to humans and cannot execute operations autonomously, like "a brain without hands."

Once agents can hold and manage funds, entirely new financial applications and even ecosystems will emerge. Coinbase has outlined several aspects of the new applications that may emerge on-chain:

- Autonomous DeFi for Agents: Enabling agents to monitor cross-protocol liquidity mining situations, autonomously manage liquidity positions around the clock, and conduct autonomous trading on Base, all based on pre-set permissions and risk control strategies by humans. Humans can sleep soundly, leaving the tedious tasks to agents.

- Agent Commerce: Agents use the x402 protocol to autonomously purchase computing resources, access advanced data streams, and pay related fees, creating a truly self-sustaining agent economy.

- Agent Business: Enabling agents to participate in the creator economy, make payments to other agents or users, and even tokenize the content they generate.

- Multi-chain Agent Operations: Although an agent's wallet is on Base, they can autonomously manage positions across multiple chains and execute strategies.

By lowering the barrier for ordinary users to install wallets for their agents, combined with the steadily developing payment protocol x402 and the added benefit of no gas fees for agents, Coinbase's ambitious layout is初步 taking shape. Although it's hard to predict what stunning innovations the Agent economy will bring in the future, for degens, this is undoubtedly the next big narrative that needs attention starting now.

Shortly after Coinbase announced the launch of Agentic Wallets, Solana immediately followed up by retweeting lobster.cash, an AI Agent autonomous payment solution on the Solana chain launched by Crossmint. Its core function is largely similar to Agentic Wallets—enabling agents to have autonomous wallets and independently manage and operate assets.

The new war surrounding the on-chain economy of Agents has already begun.