Coinbase's Jesse Pollak: AI agents will make crypto payments invisible — and x402 is the protocol to do it!

Roughly $48 million in payment volume has already flowed through x402, the open-source payments protocol co-developed by Coinbase, Microsoft, Google, and Mastercard — with about 95% of that activity settling on Base, the Ethereum L2 Pollak co-founded. The numbers are early, but the thesis behind them is large: AI agents need money as software, and crypto rails are the only infrastructure built to deliver it.

"What was almost impossible nine months ago is now totally possible," Pollak told CoinDesk, pointing to the accelerating autonomy of AI systems that now need to pay for data access, compute, and services without human intervention. x402 enables on-demand API payments without subscriptions or legacy billing — a single smart contract call moves money globally, instantly, and near-free.

Pollak's long-term vision is an open marketplace where agents discover, purchase, and consume…