Why Crypto Could Become the Payment Rail for AI Agents - With Coinbase's Jesse Pollak

From Financial News Network: Spotlight · 38:26

Show by The Financial News Network

In the first episode of the new season of Fintech X AI, host Jillian Williams sits down with Jesse Pollak, creator of Base and a longtime leader at Coinbase, to talk about what happens when AI agents start spending money.Jesse explains why he believes crypto could become a natural payment rail for AI: Agents are built to interact with software, and stablecoins and crypto wallets give them a programmable way to transact without relying on payment systems designed for humans. They discuss where agentic payments are already gaining traction, from micropayments for data and AI inference to the longer-term opportunity in everyday commerce.The conversation also covers Base’s evolution into what Jesse describes as a blockchain for global finance, the growing adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets, and why major financial institutions have become much more serious about crypto over the past 18 months.Jillian and Jesse also get into one of the harder questions around agentic commerce: what happens when an AI spends the wrong amount, buys the wrong thing, or simply gets it wrong? Jesse shares how payments infrastructure may need to evolve to bring familiar protections like refunds, authorization and consumer safeguards into an agent-driven world.Plus, Jesse explains how AI is changing the way teams inside Coinbase actually work, why smaller teams can now ship dramatically faster, and his prediction that agentic commerce could account for a meaningful share of payments within the next five years.Follow The Fintech News NetworkLinkedinXInstagramTikTokYouTube

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