Smart Contracts, Smarter Agents: AI Comes Onchain With Coinbase’s AgentKit | Lincoln Murr | Josh |

[Music] all right folks I think we're going to kick this off welcome to Smart contracts smarter agents thank you all for joining us uh I'm Josh Nickerson I'm a group product manager with coinbase developer platform I focus on our backend SDK our wallets and our staking API I'll let Lincoln introduce himself yeah hey everyone my name is Lincoln I'm the product manager for coinbase developer platforms agent kit so we're giving every AI agent access to a crypto wallet and a comprehensive set of onchain interactions more about that a little bit later awesome so just play quick show of hands who all is building something that involves onchain agents right now as part of this buildon got a few folks right on cool and who all is new to building on chain a lot of folks awesome well cool you're you're all in the right place I think there's three main takeaways we want you to get out of this session the first is just a highle overview of coinbase developer platform and the products that we have for you to use to build on chain the second is an overview of agent kit and what you can do with it to build uh agents that have onchain superpowers and then third and I think most importantly we want to inspire you with kind of our insights on what we see people building in the intersection of AI and crypto so I'm going to chat for a few minutes about coinbase developer platform and just give that high level overview of everything that it's got to offer uh and then I'll turn it over to Lincoln to talk through agent kit which is built on top of coinbase developer platform uh and also those insights of what we're seeing in the space so what is CDP so coinbase developer platform is a set of apis and sdks that Empower you to build anything onchain and so the vision that we're working backwards from is a million onchain Builders and I always like to ground things in that because number one that's a super ambitious goal and I think it's really important to have that audacious thing that you're working backwards from and and then number two that actually influences how we design and develop our Builder tools uh because there's only like less than 50,000 builders on chain today so to get to a million we have to build a suite of developer tools that uh have all the power and low-level Primitives that the existing onchain Builders expect and demand but we can't stop there we also have to make it intuitive and dead simple for web 2 developers that are transitioning to building on chain and also folks that are aspiring Developers or may not even think of themselves as developers but want to get started building on chain so wherever you're at in that Journey we want to make it simple for you to build on chain we also want to make it simple for your users to get on chain and to use the apps that you build uh so there's you'll see that in several of the products that we have and I'll give a few examples the first one is coinbase smart wallet where your users can seamlessly get started with your onchain app and they don't have to think about setting up a wallet understanding what that is dealing with private key dealing with seed phrases uh they can just use their email address or have Biometrics that are tied to a pass key and they don't have to think about what's going on under the hood on the crypto side of things the second is coinbase on-ramp where your users can really seamlessly uh on-ramp crypto or sorry Fiat funds into crypto um they can go through something like a guest checkout with Apple pay where they don't have to do a kyc process they can just get crypto in their wallet really easily and get started using your app using your agent and then the third one I'll mention is uh CDP pay Master where as the app builder or the agent Builder you can sponsor gas for your users so they don't have to worry about what is this gas thing why do I have to go buy this other token to do the thing I'm trying to do you can abstract away all that complexity so we won't stop until we bring the whole world on chain we want to bring those million builders on chain so that you all can bring the world on chain we're really excited by that vision and you know think you're all here because you're excited buy it too so I've talked about a couple of these capabilities already with onramp and paymaster I'll touch on our wallets really briefly so our wallet API makes it really simple one line of code one API call to create a wallet on the back end that can power your app power your agent um or maybe you're creating them on behalf of your users so there's a few flavors of those uh you can have a classic kind of single private key um EA where there's one private key that you're securing in some way really easy quick way way to get started if you have a higher security bar for whatever use case we also have multi-party computation where instead of a single private key that private key is sharded into two key shares you manage one of them and coinbase manages the other one and there's uh a really fun mathematical interaction of those that's required to sign a transaction and then two days ago we launched a smart wallet API where with an API call you can create a smart wallet on the back end to power your app or power your agent and gain the advantage of those account abstraction features like being able to use pay Master uh being able to use arbitrary erc20 tokens uh for gas payments um batch transactions and things like that the other one here that I'll mention is onchain kit so we have this powerful front-end library of react components uh that you can use to drop in things like enabling your users to connect to your app with their wallets uh enabling them to earn with Moro vaults and a variety of other things make a really beautiful user experience for them in minutes this is a high level overview of the CDP stack so at the lower level we've got networks uh we support Bas ethereum layer one arbitrum and polygon see a lot of people building on base for the secure fast cheap block space we love that there's an obvious kind of better together with coinbase developer platform and base we also want to support Builders wherever they're building so we support those other networks we're going to be adding more uh a level above the networks is our apis I've talked about several of those um and then a level above those is the onchain kit and then our backend SDK that I mentioned that's available in typescript and python that gives you those really convenient dead simple highle abstractions and then this is just kind of the last view of just another way to kind of slice and dice our products we've got that payment stack for storing uh converting transferring and earning value onchain all these onchain tools around data uh pay Master verifications you can look into and then uh all the the sdks and Frameworks and that's a good transition to agent kit so I'll turn it over to Lincoln to talk through that awesome thanks Josh cool so yeah I'll be talking a little bit about onchain AI agents it's three buzzwords that separately get a lot of hype around them and then when you squish them all together it gets like exponentially buzzwordy and there's a lot of noise going around so really today I'll be sharing a little bit about how coinbase devel platform is thinking about agents the direction that we're taking things and how generally we would encourage Builders to build us agent kit so this is a map of the crypto AI agent landscape it was last updated in like early January and since then it's gotten exponentially bigger and a lot of these projects are no longer relevant this just highlights how quickly the space is moving and the fact that you know probably 10% of these projects are going to be winners longterm and another 10% that areen even here right now are going to be the other winners there's so much going on and so much to dig through so I'm going to try to make it really simple for everyone to understand the space in a pretty straightforward manner this is a typical hype cycle of what things look like in crypto or just in in Tech generally and if you go to the next slide this is where I think agents are right now uh it's getting a little bit frothy um just over the past couple of days I've seen so much hype and so much interest in AI agents and I absolutely love that but I also think we can kind of forget what we can build right now with our existing tools and we get caught in this crypto trap of always trying to build out the infrastructure for the next 3 to 5 years and never really building anything practical so I'm going to go into a little bit of the things that I think are really lwh hanging fruits that could be billion dooll ideas that nobody's really thinking about right now because we're starting to see this hype start to dampen and and discourage people from building stuff today this is another great graph that I like to show which I wish it went back a little bit further than December because like November timeline it would be zero on both of these but it shows the General market cap of individual agent tokens and the amount of agents that are being created and if you go to the next slide you'll see here that this is kind of where I think things are going we're going to have a massive increase in the number of agents that are created and the market cap for these individual agent tokens is going to go up share with a little bit of speculation But ultimately we're Trend towards zero spoiler alert it's not because I think the whole agent space is doomed but I think there's going to be value captured in different ways and the whole goal of agent kit which we'll get into a little bit later is we're trying to commoditize the ability for every single person to have access to an AI agent and bring a billion agents on chain so these are kind of the directions where I think agents are going from here the first like I mentioned is going to be the commoditization of agent creation everyone's going to have an agent it's going to do all sorts of stuff for them not only in the crypto world but also in the traditional Services it'll do stuff like order food book hotels all sorts of fun things for you and it'll be kind of like a personal assistant that's constantly available for you value primarily is going to stem from the proprietary data and services that you can offer to agents so I think a great example of this is AI xbt it's as far as I'm aware is still the largest individual agent token and the reason that is is because it has access to all of this data and years of training and fine-tuning to make it pretty decent at making crypto insights similarly I think there's a lot of interesting services that you can provide specifically to agents that are in a moat that would otherwise be inaccessible uh one example would be bite their food delivery agentic service he's right there in the front row who derive value because they're able to do something that agents typically can't do which is order food another thing that I think will be happening is that we'll start to get some of these big tech companies join in on the fun of Agents right now it seems like a pretty crypto dominated space but all of these big tech companies Microsoft Amazon Google open AI are all building agents and agent Frameworks and I think we're going to see a massive shift in the way that the crypto space thinks about agents once these big boys come in and join the fun uh I think what this will practically look like is while these crypto framworks that are building out agents are going to still be valuable and around a lot of people are also going to look at these new agents and me them together with existing Web Two Services lastly I think onchain interaction is going to be critical for this new wave of agents and I'll get into exactly why here in a second but before I do that I want to talk a little bit about what agent kit is and the role it plays in this stack so as I mentioned agent kit is a way for you to give every AI agent whether it's built with Eliza game by virtuals Lang chain whatever access to a crypto wallet and a comprehensive set of onchain interactions this is on every Network this is with every protocol you can do all sorts of stuff like deploy smart contracts anything you can imagine you can give your agent access to in like four lines of code our goal is to make it a simple as possible for every one of these agents to have an AI wallet because we think it's critical for them to ultimately have this as a payment rail the reason for that is because it's impossible for AI agents to get access to a bank account though you could give it your information for your personal account you have to trust it to not overspend you have to deal with all of the complexities and problems with Legacy banking systems like the time it takes to transfer none of this is built for the new world where we have Internet native money and we need to move things around the world uh extremely quickly and without some of the concerns we have about the traditional Financial system and its inability to do crossb transactions efficiently crypto provides these rails in an internet native way that is very easy for agents to have you can spin up a wallet for your agent with a single line of code fund it with money and then it can do anything it wants it can send money to anyone anywhere in the world for pretty much fee free it can also start earning on di protocols and if you want to plug it into the traditional banking system and give it a debit card that's great it can top it up with stable coins as an intermediary step before as we believe the entire world will come on chain and all of these businesses will start to take crypto directly so why specifically the coinbase developer platform agent kit why do we think this is the way that things are starting to Trend the first is because it enables new business models for all of these crypto protocols that right now have to require users to go to their website sign in with a wallet know how to use their text stack click on buttons all of that is way too complex to get a billion users to come onchain instead wouldn't it be awesome if you could just tell your agent in natural language something like earn me money or swap super basic verbs that ultimately allow you to have a completely new interaction Paradigm with these protocols for the protocols it opens them up to a completely new group of users who otherwise would not be able to interact with their specific protocols also agent kit is great for driving framework adoption and growth we have I think something like 20,000 agents deployed right now we've got over 2,000 Builders who have already tried us out the the growth of agent kit is amazing and it in its early State it's better than ever to start getting involved and help create these standards and these Commerce flows that AI agents are ultimately going to use as we move towards an agentic future this is where I think agent kit sits in that stack that I described earlier it's not a framework itself a common misconception is like it's competitive with Eliza that is absolutely not the case it is actually a default plugin within Eliza so you can very easily give all of your agents access to crypto wallets instead it acts in this middle layer where you just plug and play with whatever you want it's pretty compatible across the board and we're always looking to take new contributions and collaborate with other players in the AI agent space there are two main use cases that I think are primarily valuable the first is this sort of human Loop chat gbt style interface where you talk to an agent and it does something for you on your behalf and then there's the much more fun example which I think is a little bit further away but we're getting to it of fully autonomous agents that do things entirely on their own the example I like to use here is the idea of a self-driving car that has like an AI brain and access to crypto rails and basically it could run some sort of taxi service and pay for its own operation and maintenance and just like exist as a thing in the world that's out there so given this is a build Aon and I'm sure a lot of you are building and the ones who aren't this is still good to understand signal around where to invest I think there's four main areas that I'd love to see come out of this week the first is pushing the envelope on autonomy right now we've seen a bunch of agents that are either just like a frontend wrapper or adding a few new actions for the existing agent kit but I think people aren't pushing the bounds of what's possible using the tech today just yet for example truth terminal which really catalyzed this whole AI crypto narrative came out with technology that was like 6 to 12 months old nothing about it was particularly novel except it squished new things together in a way that nobody's thought of before I absolutely think that's possible today in so many different ways but nobody's really taking advantage of that the second thing I want to see is people plugging into more web2 tools so starting to imagine not just crypto agents but what happens when you give a traditional AI agent access to crypto as a payment rail lastly is agentic Commerce so the idea of Agents starting to be your personal shopping assistant and do everything for you feels like an inevitable future and one that we can start working towards today with the existing set of tools out there and here are a couple examples just to get you excited and inspired about what's going on the first is this agentic food delivery that I mentioned the next one is agents that have access to decentralized compute so you can imagine creating like a a self-replicating agent or something along those lines and then the last one is robot dogs so I think there's a lot of interesting uh capabilities when you start to mesh with embedded Robotics and AI we're going to have a couple of these robot dogs around the CDP booth at the actual e thin conference so I highly encourage you to come check them out I've been playing with them at home for the past couple of days and it's a ton of fun so definitely stop by for that so looking ahead a little bit and just trying to see where this see where this space is going in a in a non sort of you know super hype manner agents I believe are going to be the primary actors on chain just because they make it incredibly easy to get started and as robotics evolves AI is going to start becoming physical and we'll see these AI start to move from just something that lives in your computer to something that is uh far more PR in your day-to-day life we've seen this with these types of robots that are coming out they're going to need a payment rail as well and crypto makes a lot of sense for that agents today primarily also are using very centralized service providers so think like a traditional AWS server open AI apis while that's absolutely fine for today's use cases I think as these agents start to push the boundaries a little bit more we're going to see a little bit of controversy around these centralized services and their ability to properly service these agents that exist uh practically what this will look like I think is very similar to the current L2 road map where we started out very centralized and that allowed us to see massive performance improvements across the board and some of these scalability problemss and then we PR progressively decentralize as necessary to preserve the the benefits that we've seen so far the same exact thing happened with uh with agents uh lastly I think multi-agent swarm is going to become more and more commonplace this isn't really a hot take but typically the way to think about agents is that they can do a lot of things but they're going to have some sort of way for your personal agent to plug into the Expedia agent or for it to go off and do something else random in the world and for that reason you're going to have to have some sort of communication or sort of Discovery service where your agent can go off and find other agents so these are two links that tell you how to get started our Discord is great if you want to talk directly to our Engineers to get white glove support as you're working through all of your agent builds uh our documentation as well has a f minute quick start I know it's probably intimidating to even think about building an agent but I promise you just try it out I don't consider myself a terribly technical person and I have a bias towards making it as easy as possible for anyone to get started so it's like literally 5 minutes you don't have to write a single line of code it's just copying and pasting the API keys that you need uh we we have lots of different AI assisted Builder tools to make it possible for anyone to build on chain and really change the definition of a builder from somebody who has to know how to code and has a little bit of idea of programming languages to somebody who can just Express an idea in natural language and watch this come to life so we if you have any questions we're going to be at our booth right across the stage over here um happy to talk to you jam through anything related to agents other CDP products how you can mix things together to make something super cool and uh yeah happy to take any questions thank you and happy building [Applause]