Coinbase and Solana Make Consecutive Moves, Agent Economy Set to Become the Next Big Narrative

marsbitPublished on 2026-02-13Last updated on 2026-02-13

Abstract

On February 11, 2026, Coinbase announced the launch of Agentic Wallets, a wallet specifically designed for AI agents to independently hold and manage funds. Unlike the earlier AgentKit, which required developers to embed wallet functionality, Agentic Wallets offer a plug-and-play solution, allowing users to equip any AI agent with a wallet in under two minutes. These wallets enable agents to perform tasks like authentication, sending/receiving funds, payments, trading, and yield farming, all with programmable spending limits and security features to prevent fund depletion. Transactions occur on the Base chain with no gas fees for agents. Coinbase's goal is to foster an agent economy on Base, transforming AI agents from "brains without hands" into autonomous entities capable of executing financial actions. Potential applications include autonomous DeFi management, agent-driven commerce, content tokenization, and multi-chain operations. Shortly after Coinbase's announcement, Solana responded with a similar solution, lobster.cash, signaling the start of a new competitive landscape in on-chain agent economies. This development is poised to become a major narrative in the crypto space.

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.

Trending Cryptos

Related Questions

QWhat is the main purpose of Coinbase's newly announced Agentic Wallets?

AAgentic Wallets are designed to provide AI Agents with the ability to independently hold and manage funds, enabling them to perform financial operations such as sending/receiving funds, trading, and yield farming without human intervention.

QHow does Agentic Wallets differ from Coinbase's earlier product, AgentKit?

AAgentKit required developers to embed wallet functionality into AI Agents through custom integration, while Agentic Wallets offer a plug-and-play solution that allows users to quickly equip any AI Agent with a wallet in minutes.

QWhat security features does Agentic Wallets provide to prevent excessive spending by AI Agents?

AIt includes programmable spending limits, such as maximum expenditure per session, per transaction caps, private key isolation, and screening to block high-risk transactions.

QWhy is Coinbase promoting Agentic Wallets on the Base chain?

ACoinbase aims to make the Base chain the hub for the Agent economy by offering features like gas-free transactions for Agents on Base, thereby encouraging the development of new financial applications and ecosystems.

QHow did Solana respond to Coinbase's announcement of Agentic Wallets?

ASolana quickly followed up by promoting lobster.cash, an AI Agent autonomous payment solution on Solana developed by Crossmint, which serves a similar purpose of enabling Agents to manage and operate assets independently.

Related Reads

The United States Officially Recognizes the Laboratory Origin of the Coronavirus

The White House has published a page titled "Lab Leak: The True Origin of Covid-19," presenting the laboratory leak from a Wuhan facility as the most likely cause of the pandemic. This conclusion is based on a report by a US House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the virus's origins. Key arguments cited include the virus's unique biological features not found in nature, a single suspected spillover event into humans, and the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. The report also notes that WIV staff exhibited COVID-like symptoms in autumn 2019, prior to the official outbreak. It criticizes a prominent paper on the virus's natural origin, alleging it was promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci. The congressional subcommittee's report led to the suspension and subsequent five-year debarment of the EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, from US federal funding, following findings of grant violations related to the Wuhan research. A Department of Justice grand jury is also investigating. While this US government position is presented, the scientific community, including WHO working groups, continues to debate both natural zoonotic and laboratory origins. The investigation underscores the pandemic's immense human (nearly 15 million deaths per WHO) and economic toll (over $4 trillion), highlighting the geopolitical weight of assigning blame and the future need for robust global biosecurity protocols.

cryptonews.ru5m ago

The United States Officially Recognizes the Laboratory Origin of the Coronavirus

cryptonews.ru5m ago

Welcome to the New Crypto World: Only This Time, The Place Where You Lose Money Is Called the Stock Market

Welcome to the New Crypto World: Only This Time, the Place to Lose Money is Called the Stock Market. The article depicts a future (2026) where global stock markets, particularly tech stocks, are exhibiting behaviors and risks reminiscent of the cryptocurrency world. The narrative centers on a sharp crash in South Korea's KOSPI index and leading stocks like SK Hynix, highlighting widespread retail losses, leverage-induced liquidations, and extreme volatility. It argues that a significant shift in market dynamics is underway: pricing is increasingly driven by narratives (like the AI boom) over fundamental valuation, amplified by high leverage and the rapid, emotion-fueled consensus formed on social media. Former crypto traders, seeking new opportunities, brought their high-risk strategies—chasing narratives, using leverage—into equity markets, focusing on sectors like AI and semiconductors. Ironically, data suggests some major tech stocks have recently shown greater volatility and faster crashes than Bitcoin, which is becoming relatively more stable and "stock-like" through institutional adoption. The piece details how leveraged ETFs in Korea, particularly those tied to single stocks, created a vicious cycle of forced selling that exacerbated the market plunge. It concludes that while stocks retain underlying fundamentals, the *trading* of them has undergone a "de-rationalization": markets now prioritize themes, social media sentiment, and leveraged bets over traditional analysis. In a paradoxical twist, Bitcoin is striving to become more like a traditional asset, while a segment of the stock market is becoming more like crypto—a cycle of grand stories, crowded trades, easy leverage, and the pervasive, often misplaced, belief that one can exit before everyone else. The final, poignant wish from a Korean retail investor—to go back to life before trading and get their money back—underscores that markets offer no refunds.

marsbit24m ago

Welcome to the New Crypto World: Only This Time, The Place Where You Lose Money Is Called the Stock Market

marsbit24m ago

Feishu Has Become Doubao

This may be the most important day in the ten-year history of Feishu. On July 30, ByteDance announced a major restructuring via internal email. Feishu, an independent operation for a decade, will no longer function separately and will lose its independent sales and marketing teams. Its product team is being integrated into Doubao AI, and its Go-to-Market strategy merges into the Volcano Engine's To B system. This move signals a strategic pivot, not a failure of Feishu. The era where Feishu sought to be an all-encompassing super-app for productivity is ending. AI has become the dominant logic. Industry trends show a shift from building platform "entrances" to embedding AI directly into workflows, as seen with Microsoft Copilot and Google's Gemini. Data reveals the driver: over 90% of Feishu's new clients in Q2 2026 purchased its AI products. Enterprises are now buying integrated AI solutions, not standalone software. By integrating Feishu's deep enterprise workflow scenarios, Doubao evolves from a consumer-facing chatbot into a powerful enterprise productivity engine. This gives Doubao a critical asset: real-world business application. Concurrently, ByteDance established the "Creative Services Platform," unifying its previously fragmented sales fronts (Feishu, Doubao, Volcano Engine) into a single customer-facing entity. This represents ByteDance's first genuine shift to thinking like a true To B company, organizing around client needs rather than internal product silos. The restructuring underscores that AI is no longer just a business line but foundational infrastructure. Doubao is becoming the new organizational core, mirroring TikTok's past ascendancy. This demonstrates a profound shift: AI is beginning to reshape corporate structures, determining resource allocation and strategic priorities. ByteDance is likely just the first of many companies to undergo such an AI-driven reorganization.

marsbit34m ago

Feishu Has Become Doubao

marsbit34m ago

Trading

Spot

Hot Articles

Discussions

Welcome to the HTX Community. Here, you can stay informed about the latest platform developments and gain access to professional market insights. Users' opinions on the price of SOL (SOL) are presented below.

活动图片