More and more companies are talking about how agentic coding is transforming their workflows.
In a recent interview, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong offered a candid and detailed look at just how deeply AI agents have been embedded into the company’s day-to-day operations — from software development to customer support to a genuinely novel use case that Armstrong believes is unique to the crypto industry: giving AI agents their own stablecoin wallets.
“More and more of the code is being written by these agents — more than 50%,” Armstrong said. “Customer support inquiries, I think, is about 60% answered by agents.”
When asked whether Coinbase was building its own AI tools or relying on third-party vendors, Armstrong said the answer was both. “We’re using vendors. We have a lot of custom models internally as well. We’re testing different use cases — for instance, around compliance automation, we’re building a lot of stuff in-house. You can really rapidly prototype stuff and get it out there.”
Armstrong noted that AI agents are increasingly running into a practical problem: they need to spend money to get work done, and the traditional financial system isn’t built for non-human entities.
“The thing that’s more unique to crypto is that these AI agents are increasingly needing to do payments to get work done, and we’re giving them all stablecoin wallets,” he said.
Armstrong painted a vivid picture of what this looks like in practice. “In the traditional financial world, you and I can go get a credit card where we have to be identified as a human. But if you’re an agent trying to get work done, you either have to bother your human every time — ‘will you approve this purchase?’ — or, if you want these agents to just go and get work done overnight, or over the next hours or week, they might need to spin up AWS resources, get through a paywall on the internet to read a research paper, buy a domain name, spin up a marketing program.”
The solution, Armstrong argued, is to treat AI agents more like digital employees — complete with something resembling a corporate card. “If you really want to treat them almost like their own digital employees, they need to have a corporate card kind of thing. And traditional corporate cards can’t be issued to non-human entities. And so we’re giving them stablecoin wallets.”
Armstrong acknowledged the novelty of what Coinbase is doing in this space. “They’re doing a lot of machine-to-machine payments. This is all very new in the last few months, but it’s been getting a lot of traction. We’ve built a couple of tools that allow any agent to get a stablecoin wallet inside it.”
Armstrong’s comments reflect a broader wave of AI adoption sweeping through the tech industry. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed last year that AI is now writing more than 30% of the company’s code, while Microsoft had reported similar figures. These numbers have likely zoomed this year — Anthropic said that Claude Code wrote nearly all the code for Cowork, and nearly all the code at the company is now being written by AI. Agentic AI seems to be a step further — Cursor said that 35% of its merged PRs were being written by AI agents, and now Coinbase says that 50% of its code is being written by agentic AI systems, with Armstrong himself committing code. It remains to be seen where this all ends up, but the field of software engineering already looks unrecognizable from just a year ago.