On 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 equip AI Agents with a fundamental capability needed for their next evolution—the ability to independently hold and manage funds.

As early as November 2024, Coinbase launched AgentKit, but there is an essential difference between AgentKit and Agentic Wallets. AgentKit is 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. 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, as easy as adding a Skill to their agent. In Coinbase's words, "it takes less than 2 minutes."

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, and earn yields (through Yield Farming or LP), among other things.

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

Supported assets are based on the Base chain. To ensure that agents active on Base are not interrupted due to insufficient Gas fees, actions 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 advice, identify arbitrage opportunities, and more, but they lack identity, accounts, and wallets. Therefore, they can only offer suggestions to humans and cannot autonomously execute actions, 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 prospects for new applications that could emerge on-chain:

- Autonomous Agent DeFi: Allowing agents to monitor cross-protocol liquidity mining situations, autonomously manage liquidity positions around the clock, and conduct autonomous trading on Base, based on permissions and risk control strategies set by humans. Humans can sleep soundly, leaving the tedious work 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-sufficient agent economy.

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

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

By lowering the barrier for ordinary users to install wallets for their agents, combined with the steadily developing payment protocol x402 and offering the benefit of no Gas fees for agents, Coinbase's ambition is already taking shape. Although it's hard to say what stunning innovations the Agent economy will bring in the future, for degens, this is definitely the next big narrative to start paying attention to now.

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

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