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Armstrong points out that AI agents cannot open bank accounts, but they can have wallets.
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Coinbase and Binance have already launched tools for AI agents to operate autonomously.
On March 9, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), former CEO of Binance, and Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder of Coinbase, noted that AI agents will outnumber humans in payments.
The interesting thing is that both messages were given just a few hours apart. While CZ’s post was at 12:30 pm (UTC), Armstrong’s was at 2:58 pm (UTC). Although it could be a coincidenceseems to indicate that industry leaders are aiming for a digital economy led by payments with AI agents.
CZ, for his part, wrote in X: «AI agents will a million times more payments than humansand they will use cryptocurrencies.
Hours later, Armstrong added: “Very soon there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They cannot open a bank account, but they can have a cryptocurrency wallet. «Think about it.»
Armstrong’s statement is not just a projection: it points to a structural limitation of the traditional financial system. AI agents can execute complex processes autonomously, but lack the legal personality to access conventional banking services.
Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, do not require legal identity to operate: any program can control a wallet. That asymmetry is, according to Armstrong, the driving force behind future adoption (although there are also risks in delegating control of a wallet to an AI agent without human supervision).
What both executives describe already has concrete form in the products that Binance and Coinbase are launching.
Coinbase: autonomous payments as core business
The x402 protocol, developed by Coinbase in August 2025, is the infrastructure that allows AI agents to settle cryptocurrency payments each other automatically, without human interventionin the Base network, Ethereum and Solana, among others, as explained by NoticiasVE.
According to data published by the analyst known in X as Sam Altcoin, x402 exceeded 150 million accumulated transactions and a volume greater than USD 550 million.
According to the previous image, in October 2025, x402 recorded 10,000 transactions and by February 2026, it exceeded 100 million, an increase of 999.900%.
This growth occurs in parallel with that of the ecosystem that feeds it: since January 29, when the ERC-8004 standard, which allows register AI agents on the Ethereum blockchainwas deployed to the mainnet, the number of agents created grew from 15,000 to over 85,000 today, an increase of 467%.
Likewise, ERC-8004 is now available on other networks such as Solana, Polygon and BNB Chain.
Last February 11, Coinbase complemented x402 with the launch of Agentic Wallets, a wallet infrastructure designed for AI agents maintain and manage cryptocurrency funds without direct human intervention.
The tool allows these agents to spend, receive payments and execute trading operations autonomously, with programmable spending limits and compliance filters.
On the other hand, on March 1, Armstrong revealed that the transition to AI is already operational internally at Coinbase– More than 50% of the company’s production code is generated by automated systems and 60% of support queries are resolved without human intervention.
«Traditional corporate cards cannot be issued to non-human entities. That is why we are giving all AI agents stablecoin wallets,” said the executive, who described this capability as “very new in recent months” but already with “a lot of traction” within the company.
Binance: AI for trading and market analysis
On March 7, two days before CZ and Armstrong’s statements, the Binance team launched AI Agent Skills, a set of seven tools that enable autonomous AI agents execute buy and sell ordersaudit smart contracts, analyze market data and track smart money movements on-chain.
Additionally, on January 22, Binance Wallet added three AI tools to help users interpret market trends: a function that identifies which tokens are gaining attention in the community, another that shows the sentiment on X, and a third aimed at detecting movements of social interest in cryptocurrencies.
Finally, another proof of the adoption of AI at Binance is what was presented in October 2025 by the exchange: Binance developed together with Google a technology called Agent Payments Protocol that allows AI Agents Make Payments Using Binance Pay “securely and in real time,” the company reported at the time.