Coinbase announced on Tuesday that has built a tool that allows users of its Base blockchain network to plug into services like Claude and Cursor. The new tool, called Base MCP, makes it easier to use AI for conducting crypto transactions such as trading and lending, and comes as part of a broader push by Coinbase and payments giant Stripe to redefine the technical underpinning of online commerce.
The name Base MCP invokes a popular standard known as Model Context Protocol launched by Anthropic in 2024 that makes it easy for agents to communicate with AI models. According to Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Product for Coinbase, MCPs are like a “nice wrapper” atop APIs that facilitate a wide variety of data requests without rigid coding rules.
In an interview with Fortune, Murr explained that adding an MCP tool means Base wallets will become more versatile since users can now empower their agents to conduct a wider range of transactions across different platforms. In a statement, Coinbase provided additional context: “Unlike siloed agentic wallets that only live in a terminal, your Base Account travels with you — trades, history, and portfolio sync whether you’re in-agent or in the Base App.”
The launch of Base MCP also represents another incremental step for Coinbase’s push to promote the adoption of its x402 payment standard, which it released last May. That standard is named for a payments protocol built into the original design of the web, which lay dormant for decades, but became newly relevant with the advent of so-called agentic commerce.
All of this is significant because these new standards—x402 for payments and MCPs for communication—enable a whole new type of commerce based on micro transactions related to research and data.
Currently, the process for obtaining data typically revolves around subscribing to APIs that charge a monthly credit card fee, and where one-off transactions are economically unviable. The rise of agentic commerce, however, makes it possible to task agents with collecting small scraps of data across the web, and making payments using stablecoins like USDC. Unlike credit card networks, crypto rails like Base make it viable to engage in thousands of tiny transactions since payment processing fees can cost less than a cent.
While there appears to be huge potential for this new form of commerce, the reality for now is that it remains incredibly small and experimental. A recent report by Keyrock found that, over the past year, agent-based transactions have totaled $73 million, which is a tiny fraction of the $14.5 trillion processed annually by Visa. At the same time, agentic commerce could grow quickly given that major companies are investing heavily in the field. In addition to Stripe and Coinbase, Visa and Google are major players in the space too.
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