Coinbase and Solana make successive moves, Agent economy to become the next big narrative

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 provide AI Agents with a fundamental capability needed for their further evolution—independently holding and managing funds.

As early as November 2024, Coinbase had already introduced AgentKit, but AgentKit and Agentic Wallets are fundamentally different. AgentKit was used to "embed" a wallet into an agent, requiring developers to perform custom integration. On the other hand, Agentic Wallets are about "quickly giving any agent a wallet," making it more plug-and-play.

In simple terms, the previous AgentKit was a suite provided to AI Agent developers, enabling them to create agents with built-in wallet functionality. Now, in an era where anyone can quickly launch their AI Agent, everyone can install a wallet for their agent through a few simple commands, just as easily as adding a Skill to their agent. In Coinbase's words, "done in less than 2 minutes."

Complex on-chain operations have been abstracted by Coinbase into Skills that can be installed on the agent for simple command execution. Agentic Wallets enable agents to perform tasks such as identity verification, fund send/receive, payments, transactions, earning rewards (Yield Farming or LP), and more.

To prevent AI Agents from rapidly depleting funds due to excessive autonomy, Agentic Wallets also offer programmable spending limits, including features such as the maximum amount an agent can spend per session, per transaction limit, private key isolation protection, and screening to prevent high-risk transactions.

The supported assets are based on the Base chain. To ensure that agents active on Base do not pause actions due to insufficient gas fees, actions on Base agents do not require gas fees.

Why is Coinbase doing this?

Coinbase's ambition is clear—to enable the emergence of the Agent economy on Base.

The dilemma of AI Agents has always been that they can help analyze the market, provide investment decision advice, discover arbitrage opportunities, and more, but they have no identity, no account, no wallet, so they can only provide advice to humans and cannot execute operations autonomously, like a "brain without hands."

Once an Agent can hold and manage funds, a whole new set of financial applications and even ecosystems will emerge. Coinbase has outlined several aspects of new applications that may emerge on-chain:

- Autonomous Agent DeFi: Allows an Agent to monitor cross-protocol liquidity mining activity, autonomously manage liquidity positions 24/7, and perform autonomous trading on Base according to permissions and risk strategies set by humans. Humans can rest assured and leave the idle sitting to the Agent.

- Agent Trading: 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 Commerce: Enables Agents to participate in the creator economy, make payments to other Agents or users, and even tokenize their generated content.

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

By lowering the barrier for ordinary users to install wallets for Agents, combined with the steadily developing x402 payment protocol and offering Agent-friendly fee waivers, Coinbase's ambition has taken its initial steps. Although it is difficult to predict what stunning innovations will emerge in the future of the Agent economy, for degens, this is definitely the next big narrative to start paying attention to.

And shortly after Coinbase announced the launch of Agentic Wallets, Solana immediately followed suit, retweeting lobster.cash, an AI Agent autonomous payment solution on the Solana chain launched by Crossmint. The core function is almost identical to Agentic Wallets, both enabling Agents to have autonomous wallets to manage and operate assets independently.

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