Yesterday, Base officially launched Base MCP. By connecting Base Account to AI Agent through Base MCP, you can use colloquial language, like chatting, to have the Agent perform operations such as Swap, transfers, position tracking, and transaction history queries.

Players familiar with Base know that the main focus on the Base chain right now is AI, so such an update from Base doesn't come as a surprise. Some players even anticipate new gameplay on the Base chain, similar to the AI meme coin $SHIT on Ethereum before, where they could directly use Base MCP to let an Agent participate in chain-based token launches through chat.

But if we step back from the perspective of a chain degen and look at the competition in Agent-to-Agent payments, we might find a new answer as to why AI has become the main focus for Base.

Rapidly Developing Agent Payments

Let's rewind to September 2024. Back then, if you wanted an AI Agent to complete a payment for something, humans basically had only one choice: use browser automation tools (like headless browsers such as Playwright, Selenium) to let the AI Agent simulate human actions and complete the checkout process on a webpage.

Since this required providing payment credentials (like full credit/debit card numbers, CVV, expiration dates, etc.) to the AI Agent, this sole option was not secure.

By May 2025, Coinbase launched x402, providing an AI Agent with a crypto wallet and solving this problem in a crypto-native way. But Coinbase wasn't the only one to recognize this as a potential market, and the solutions weren't limited to just crypto-native ones. In 2025, Google launched AP2, allowing users to authorize spending permissions to an Agent. Visa expanded its existing card payment channels, launching Visa Intelligent Commerce, which doesn't give the Agent sensitive information like credit card numbers or CVV, but instead provides the Agent with specific, limited tokens to complete payments.

Today, x402 has processed 176 million transactions from AI Agents, with a total transaction volume exceeding $70 million. This amount might not seem huge, but neither Coinbase nor the traditional giants are taking this emerging payment competition lightly:

- On January 22, 2026, Capital One, the sixth-largest bank in the US with $470 billion in assets, $330 billion in deposits, and the third-largest credit card issuer in the nation, announced the acquisition of Brex for $5.15 billion to enhance AI payment capabilities.

- In March 2026, Mastercard acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for $1.8 billion.

- In February 2025, Stripe acquired the stablecoin payment platform Bridge for $1.1 billion.

While they haven't explicitly stated it, acquiring stablecoin-related companies is likely a move to prepare for the upcoming era of Agent payments. Stablecoins are indeed crucial for Agent payments.

Why Are Stablecoins Important for Agent Payments?

According to data statistics from Keyrock, the median transaction amount for Agent transactions processed on x402 so far is between $0.01 and $0.10, with 76% of transactions being under $0.30.

$0.30 is the most common flat fee per transaction in the US and many major markets. This fee is like a wall, making micropayments under $1 very uneconomical. For example, for a 3-cent API call, a $0.30 fee is 10 times the call cost; if an Agent pays with a credit card, the cumulative cost would be prohibitively high.

Blockchain solves this problem well. On Base, the transaction settlement cost is $0.0001. With this immense advantage, stablecoins have almost naturally won the competition against traditional payment giants in the realm of Agent payments.

Of the 176 million Agent transactions processed by x402, 98.6% were settled in USDC. Given the close relationship between Coinbase and Circle, it's fair to say Coinbase is also a big winner at the settlement layer.

But the settlement layer is just one layer in Agent payments. In the track of solving Agent payments via crypto-native means, Coinbase has a competitor—Stripe.

The Challenge from Stripe

This March, Stripe launched the Agent Payment Protocol MPP, which has brought Stripe's architecture map for Agent payments almost on par with Coinbase's.

- From the settlement layer: Coinbase has Base, Stripe has Tempo.

- From the wallet layer: Coinbase has Agent Wallet, Stripe has Privy.

- From the routing layer: Coinbase has built-in routing facilities, Stripe has Bridge, acquired for $1.1 billion.

- From the payment protocol: Coinbase has x402, Stripe has MPP.

Now let's return to the Base MCP mentioned at the beginning of the article. Since both competing sides now have these four layers of supporting infrastructure, the next battlefront is naturally the application layer.

This is the core reason why AI can become Base's main focus—Base needs to ensure that AI (at least in the cryptocurrency space) happens on Base. This is not actually about providing a perspective for degens on the Base chain, but about broadening the scenarios for Agent payments, enabling more Agents to conduct more transactions for more applications, thereby securing its leading position in the Agent payment track.

Once a dominant scale advantage is established, when Agent payments enter the commercial domain in the future, Coinbase stands to win even bigger.

Looking at the launch of Base MCP from this angle, one can sense that this is just a small step in Coinbase's grand ambition.