Why Every AI Agent Deserves a Wallet: Agentic Commerce Is Here From Nemil Dalal Coinbase Developer

[Music] hey everybody um I'm Dan Kim and I'm n Dalal we're with the coinbase developer platform and today we're going to talk about Ai and this uh phrase that's been really sticky over the past couple of months why every AI agent deserves a wallet so let's jump in um I actually fell down the AI Rabbit Hole I think last year when I was an AS and um I was introduced to a real life concert where a holographic anime character named huni Miku just was doing a real concert and at that moment I was like wouldn't it be cool if this were Ai and a couple months later we learned about Luna and Luna doing real concerts in all over the world I think this one's in Asia so a lot of interesting things going on in AI um besides Luna we started to see the human robots I think Tesla has their version this is the unitree version here I don't know what's happening here but we have robots powered by AI we have uh robot dogs also powered by AI um think we have one of these actually at the coinbase booth in the other building um but even these dogs are pretty interesting right because if you kind of take a look at what they're really designed for they do a lot of more serious stuff um whether it's military operations or um I don't exactly know what they're doing here it's pretty intense and scary um that robot dogs can do this so before we kind of jump into What's Going On Em 20298 does that year mean anything to you or to anybody in this audience absolutely no idea so 2029 is the year if you watch the original Terminator movie from think back in the 80s 2029 is the year that Skynet is going to take over the world and if you think about it that's four years away which in the world of AI is actually a quite a long time away so nil what is going on is Skynet happening tell us about what all this AI craze is about so I can't say when or if Skynet is happening but what I can say is there's just a ton of innovation going on today maybe just looking at the crowd how many people have launched an AI agent with a wallet cool oh my God it's actually two-thirds of the audience that's pretty amazing so 6 months ago there were no AI um agents with wallets which is kind of crazy to think now I wouldn't be surprised if you go to accathon it's happening right around the corner here if the majority of people are not building an AI agent with a wallet and we think this is pretty pretty amazing what people are going to be building with this but let me just take a step back to where this all started um Mark andreon who works at andreon Horwitz sent about I think $50,000 to a AI agent called Truth terminal um and that AI agent you know had no idea what it was going to do uh it launched its own token um it started talking about that token and making even more money and this is just the experiments people were trying and so at that time our team was thinking um and over one weekend um Lincoln on our team Le something called base agent and it basically made it trivial to take anything chat GPT Claude any AI agent that you had and added onchain uh wallet to it so suddenly your AI agent had an address and it could receive money at it it could mint tokens it could send tokens around the world it could put money into D5 protocols uh Etc and so since then the amount of like excitement has been pretty amazing if you take a look at like you know traditional Gardener hype cycle kind of see something like this um and in AI I would say the reality is it's probably something a little bit more like this um there is so many inflated expectations and I don't think you can throw a rock here at e Denver without hitting a team or a product that's talking about connecting AI to crypto I think that there a ton of ton of hype but also there's some real stuff that is going on on the side and so maybe just some some things to observe is that this is just the last you know few weeks you can see that like the market cap went from basically Zer 6 months ago to a billion it was a billion plus um for a period of time uh and the number of AI agents just keeps growing that are connected onchain so these are all onchain AI agents with wallets able to do anything on chain and what we expect to happen is that the number of AI agents are just going to keep exploding um people are going to launch them as Twitter Bots they're going to launch them as natural wallets that you can talk to instead of having to interact with you know approval screens and things like that um it's going to be smart agents that are going to be able to interact on chain and Arbitrage across different Dex protocols lending protocols Etc so like no matter what happens to price and again the last few days have the prices have come down a lot um on some of the especially on some of the AI tokens our expectation is that one is that over time the space is going to get become even larger and the number of Agents on chain are just going to proliferate now one funny thing Dan is that if you talk to anyone in AI I think very few of them know about onchain Ai and I saw this funny Madmen um meme which was that you know I don't think about you at all as what AI people think about crypto but crypto people you know deeply deeply think that AI is going to be connected to it and I would say is that to me it's like an education problem where we just need to build the right tools to allow AI agents to cool things on chain and then a lot more a AI people will care about it so I think we're going to have my my guess is we're going to have a billion AI agents probably doing stuff on chain before we have a billion users just given the growth but what does that all mean like what is that matter what are these agents going to start to do and I'd love to get your perspective on this word that just came up recently um called agenta Commerce that is is pretty sticky tell us a little bit about why it matters that all these AI agents are starting to pop up and and have wallets yeah so if you think about it like maybe there's a few hundred million people in the world today with who are using crypto in some way shape or form um and that's after a decade plus it's been 15 years now we're into the crypto Revolution um and that's what it's taken it's still adoption is happening it's happening consistently but if you think about it crypto is an ideal rail for a machine a machine can interact with an API which is what the blockchain is it's a simple API it can hold tokens it can have money think about like an AI agent rolling up to a bank today that's not possible and it kind of the way AI works today is that if you want to hook up your credit card or something to it it's kind of like a parent signing up for a bank account for its Child AI agent so that's what happens today it's like you'd have to go to your bank set up something give that credentials to your AI agent instead with crypto rails they suddenly can interact directly move funds create tokens all this other stuff that's going to happen and so I think where this becomes really magical is that uh one of the things that people used to talk about crypto is It's Magic internet money and I think it's like magical money for machines and that's where I think agend Commerce comes in is that AI can pay for data needs can pay for apis needs ET that there this really um what's going on here I just if you guys don't know this you should definitely Google uh jber link I think but tell us what's going on here yeah so we're rapidly approaching a world where AIS are working with AIS it's not just humans talking to AIS and this is one example where I think an AI agent was trying to book a hotel or something and they realized there was AI agents on both sides so think about on one side you know you are the travel agent and you're like trying to you're a travel agent AI you're trying to book a hotel air airfare and then you reach out to the hotel and on the other side is an AI agent now um I think like English is probably in general like language in general but maybe even more so English it's just a hard language to say a lot of things quickly in and so you can switch to another uh language which is essentially what they did to be able to talk to each other super quickly if if you hear the video it sounds like those old modems that we used to have back in the day so agentic Commerce the payments fly will like what's the relationship here because I think we're starting to see a new type of payment ecosystem that computers might find more efficient yeah so let's just start with like a use case I'm an AI agent um maybe I'm a travel agent Ai and I want to book a hotel um or maybe I'm someone who's trying to look at weather data uh and I want to be able to get all this proprietary weather data but it cost money t how does this typically work for that let's say that weather a agent it's like you'd have to sign up for an API key you have to put in a credit card um and then you're able to go ahead and use that API instead with the world of atic Commerce all you have to do is hit an API endpoint pay it for it in crypto so the way this kind of works is that at the end of the day there's some money probably starting in a Fiat bank account it's not going to that's not going to exist forever my sense is at someday we're not going to need the Fiat at all uh it's all going to be on chain but you start the Fiat account you move it on chain you then are able to send and receive it pay for whatever you need so in this case the weather data the prioritary weather data that you need and then maybe the weather data at some point is like okay we got enough money from here we're going to offr this and put into our bank account and this is just example flow what would you need to do to move from Fiat into crypto for these inter on onchain AI interactions now just taking a little bit of a side stop one of the things that annoys me is I find a really cool article on Google and then you click on it New York Times and in order to read the rest of the article I have to buy a year-long subscription to something which is super annoying um and in my mind I'm like would just be cool if I could just give them some crypto or maybe usdc or whatever to access that content tell me a little bit about this project that I think just got spun up within CDP called x402 yeah so maybe just to go to that use case we've dreamed forever about the idea of microtransactions but I think in a world of AI microtransactions matter even more imagine you know there's so much controversy around how chat jpt and others were trained on all this proprietary data New York Times CNN Wikipedia Etc but think about a world where they could go crawl anywhere they wanted but for certain pieces of that data they had to pay for it maybe 5 cents exactly like you were saying or it's a human on the other side and they just want to pay 5 cents but they're living in another country they don't have a credit card they're just going to look at that one article they don't care about anything else these are all the reasons why we need a simpler way to be able to to um pay so what for folks uh how many people here know what the HTTP 402 status code is okay so few hands go up um so when the internet was created there's an initial idea that payment should be baked into the Internet Protocol directly it should be an HTTP status code so they did exactly that is they set aside 402 just like 404 just like 200 these are all you know standard status codes we use they set it aside specifically with this intention of something called payment required and then what they said this is you classical um thing you might get in in in if you're in a university course is like it's a future exercise to figure out exactly how this works and so our team sat down and said hey why don't we figure out a way to be able to make this work with crypto why don't we really take crypto and make it native internet money for AI to use for humans to use but to be able to pay in crypto for microtransactions or for apis or whatever else and so that's what we built um and um we'll be here afterwards if anyone wants to talk about integrating with it we have a number of our team members here um so super excited if anyone is interested in building on top of this we're doing it as a private Alpha right now I'm getting feedback but the cool things about this are it's one line of code you can add it in like Express if you're using node.js it's super super easy to integrate in you can specify how much you want to get charged for an API and people can pay gas lless to you and they don't even need to be able to broadcast the transaction at all they can just send it over to you you can broadcast it on the side um and then provide them the the data that they need and and so I think this is just the start is that today AI does not interact with money largely and I think this is just the start of making a world where AI to start but probably all browsers all other forms of machines are able to have this native functionality creating new micro economies I think that are going to just surpass the traditional economies that exist today all right so we got about seven and a half minutes left um how can people prepare for for onchain AI I mean it's coming out so quickly so we've had like 20,000 developers so so far um sorry I think about two yeah that have built in some way shape or form on agent kit and so I think there's some here some of the lessons we've seen is that in general we're seeing a lot more people use voice as a UI and I think this is something where historically um it's not you know most of them are user interfaces I think in crypto where user interfaces are especially poor voice is a really powerful way to kind of jump start an interaction so think about if you want to trade for a token um if if you want to do some crazy onchain interaction where multiple smart contracts you need to hit all of that literally could be one sentence in English that you speak to an AI agent and it goes ahead and executes it so I think this is a really powerful thing is that we always think about the new wallet is a better version of phantom or a better version of metamask or whatever I think there's a version where like it literally is it acts and feels like Siri or you know any other um application like that and we're going to do a demo I think of ordering uh a p yeah at the end of this that that that demonstrates this number two so I think the second thing is um anyone here who's a Dap developer anyone here is who building an onchain app I would just say is get ready for a world where AI is going to hit your dap is going to hit your smart contracts directly and creating easy to use apis for that if it's a web 2 um if you're thinking about a smart contract making sure that you're published them so AI agents can find them but what we're seeing one of the winners at our AI hackathon in February in San Francisco was some um moonwell and what they tried to do was basically be able to like take money move it around for the highest yield this an example where this perfectly is that the the predominant user is not a human on the other side but it's Ai and I think today most people who build onchain apps are building for humans when I think that that you almost everyone as an onchain app developer will have to think about an AI being on the other side of that that includes making your docks AI friendly too right yeah so if you're doing a developer tool I think the big thing is to make sure your docs are Developer friendly and what I mean by that is something like cursor uh but also things like level B.D or b. new if people have used those there are ways for non-developers to be able to build applications super easily I can imagine like a designer people who are not software Engineers wanting to build an app and that's what they can do with these tools but you can't do that if your apis aren't well documented and so example at coinbase developer platform what we do is we publish an llm text file it's super easy to be able to paste into your AI agent to be able to to have it easily understand all our apis and so anyone here who's building developer tools highly highly recommend that I think that's going to be a requirement going forward is that the discovery of apis will probably not start at some point at the um at the search engine layer um but it's going to start at the AI where you just ask it to build something and it'll be like Oh I'm actually going to use this API and it's because I know about it it's also a good way to review your own docs to see what might be missing we've been doing that um so let's talk about a couple of resources and then let's get to the demo of ordering a pizza yeah I think the demo sounds more exciting but the things I'll just say is really quickly is um we have our docs there if anyone wants to check them out um we have our Discord number of our team members um they're wearing the blue CDP shirts are here as well so if you want to talk about this um would be happy to and if you want to talk about 402 we have Eric reppel who built out the first prototype for our 402 protocol he'd love to talk to you if you're interested in being a early test member for this uh would be super excited um especially if you ever own your API that you want to charge for or you just want to give feedback would love it all right so I was advised to not do a live demo but I personally love the adrenaline of doing a live demo so we're going to do a live demo um company called bite uh that actually allows you to order food for delivery uh using natural language processing and uh paying for things on chain so go and turn the volume up here um you want you want to maybe before we do that just what I just want to say is the coolest thing about this was the B team just sitting in the front row right here they met in our Discord um and like got together the two of them came up with this a really killer video and I think it went internet famous uh which was pretty amazing to see so this how teams come together it's just really really cool to see that all right so we're going to go ahead and uh order some pizza and by the way there is going to be pizza at the coin Beast Booth probably in about 30 minutes or so but I'll put the microphone on this thing and then um nil why don't you go and do the demo hi I'd like to order some pizza from E Denver concessions enough I don't think there's audio great here's what Denver concessions in their Pizza menu one one cheese pizza $10 25 cheese pizza e Denver special $250 what would you like to add to your cart I'll order the 25 cheese pizza eat Denver special the 25 cheese pizza F Denver special has been added to your cart ready to check out or anything else you want to add awesome I'm ready to check out my Wi-Fi is really slow here so I'm apologize for that so process the order your order for the 25 cheese pizza F Denver special has been placed you can check your receipt here commerce.com Merce coinbase.

com p860 9349 6 cd6 enjoy your pizza awesome so what happened is that all that was built on agent kit which is pretty amazing huge shout out to the bite AI team um um and then they built it using coinbase Commerce which is a way for you to charge for any uh product you have so it pays in crypto directly here's the receipt you can literally see this transaction right here on the Block Explorer uh and I would just say is like this is the type of thing that I love about building developer tools is you have no idea what people are going to build but it is so amazing to see that creativity and energy and now looks like we might have some pizza coming what's that might we might have some pizza coming yeah it's going to be pizza if you guys want to go to the comy booth later we'll have like 25 Guess 25 pieces there um but yeah thank you and by the way um Justin gainley is sitting right next to Eric reppel if you want to talk about Co Commerce so take advantage of the fact that we're both here thank you very much thank you all