Fireside Chat: The State of Agentic Payments with Erik Reppel and Yuga Cohler

Transcript

[applause] >> Hello everyone. It's great to be here. My name is Yuga Labs. I am as mentioned head of engineering at Coinbase developer platform. >> I'm Eric. This is more people than usually show up to our one-on-one Yuga. >> Yeah. Eric was my former boss. I actually just assumed the position so we joke that this is basically like one of our one-on-ones that we've had. >> [snorts] >> Um we're here to talk about agentic payments. You've It's a buzzword. You've probably all heard about it a lot. Uh we think about it a lot at Coinbase and we have one of the OG's around agentic payments, the founder of the X402 protocol here with us. Um show of hands, how many of you have heard of or know what X402 is?

Okay. I'd say like 60% something like that. >> good. How many How many of you have done an X402 transaction? Okay, pretty good. And how many of you had an agent do that transaction instead of clicking a button in a UI? Couple. Okay, that's pretty good. I I think my maybe the the top of mind takeaway from uh for the folks who have heard of X402 to you know, that pipeline, that funnel didn't convert very well. Uh go and go and try a transaction on X402.

Give your agent a wallet and like five bucks and experience agentic commerce for yourself. I think so much of agentic commerce right now is like a theoretical and uh people kind of opine about it, but they they don't realize this is a thing that happens hundreds of tens or hundreds of thousands of times a day and uh is actually extremely useful right now. So, there's plenty of great wallets. There's plenty of ways to give Cloddered, Codax, or whatever you use access to funds that and uh the ability to use XPO2 base MCP is quite good. There's others um but takeaway, go do an agentic commerce

transaction. >> Yeah, I mean it's top of mind for us. Uh Anthropic Fable came out today. Obviously these uh models are accelerating and while agentic payments are at their nascent stage, I think we're at about $15 million of total payments volume annualized. Uh XPO2 just hit its 100 millionth transaction and we're looking about 50 million transactions annualized as well. Um but obviously the premise of agentic payments is that AI agents as they come to life are going to need to be able to make payments. Um without that ability, they may not be able to access data, they may not be able to as useful for humans. XPO2 is like the first of its kind uh for this use case. Maybe Eric, can you just give us like a very quick uh

bullet points rundown of how XPO2 enables that? >> Yeah, so the the original sin of the internet is that there was there's no standard way to declare a payment regardless of like the rails underneath that are underneath the the payment. Like if you're if a website you're interacting with is integrated with Stripe versus Adyen versus Checkout.com, it's etc. Like all the APIs are different, all the ways of performing payment are different. And so what XPO2 does is it gives a well-typed schema and standard way of declaring how you want to receive payment. It actually doesn't necessitate blockchains. It just happens to be that blockchains are perhaps the best payment rail in the world right now.

Uh and so what you end up with if you have standardization of the format is you now create really easy programmable interfaces for agents. And so agents are inherently probabilistic mechanisms. Like everyone has probably seen their agent kind of do different things on different attempts of the same prompt. Uh that's because every time an agent does something, it's sampling a probability distribution of what actions it should take. And that means that reliability can be tricky. And so, if you're trying to fill out like 14 fields in a credit card form, that's 14 opportunities to make a mistake that will end up in your transaction not going through.

And so, what you ideally want is programmatic tools that your agent can use that will work deterministically every time. And so, your agent just needs to express, "Hey, I want to pay for this thing." versus "Okay, I must now know your name and your last name and your billing address and your shipping address and your credit card number and your CCV and your expiration date and you know, all these things, right? Um And so, as I said, like XPRT is kind of agnostic to the underlying payment infrastructure.

And so, we've seen XPRT on Solana, on Base, on Ethereum. There's probably I believe like 15 different blockchains that actively operate on XPRT. We've also seen XPRT on card rails and you know, there's no reason why you couldn't do an ACH payment over XPRT if you really wanted to put the effort in. >> Yeah. And that question comes up a lot of, "Well, why stablecoins for agentic payments? Why not cards? Why not existing methods of payment?" Um it's a reasonable question. Eric and I were discussing this before. [clears throat] Probably the um There are a few compelling answers to this. One is that it just depends on the shape of the transaction. Um Charging small fractions of a cent,

particularly in the case of microtransactions, is getting access to data, API calls, etc., naturally lend towards blockchain-based stablecoin payments as opposed to cards. The second is general program programmability. Instant settlement obviously comes into play as well. So, there are a number of reasons that stablecoins make a better fit. At CDP, Coinbase Developer Platform, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, this is essentially Coinbase's version of AWS. We provide trusted infrastructure at scale for companies to build crypto integrations into their products using the infrastructure that we've built over the course of a decade or more.

Um the way we think about agentic payments, obviously we have a very strong core product and development team that's working on it, but there's another angle to it, which is that um as more and more payments come online through stable coins, there's this key infrastock that's going to be important. And you've probably heard variations of this throughout the course of the day today, but it starts at settlement. You need some layer where the funds can settle, whether that's on base or Ethereum or some other ETH L2 or some other network. You need stable coins that can transact in value.

Uh you need custody. You need the ability to hold those stable coins securely. You need a general infrastructure harness that allows APIs, MCP servers, etc. And then you need a sort of agentic, excuse me, an enterprise level of control around that entire stock so that a company like Cloudflare or AWS can get comfortable serving using these APIs. And what's interesting is that you can provide the same infrastructure stock as an API, as a front-end consumer experience, or as an agentic entry point.

In other words, it's really at the edge that determines whether a particular crypto infrastructure stock is useful for a particular agent or human or business. And that's sort of how we've architected our entire technical stock and APIs is, "Hey, if a company wants to enable payments, for example, for merchants merchant acceptance, checkout.com uh we recently announced a partnership with. Um Shopify is another example. Uh typically, their end users are humans. They're paying they're enabling payments to merchants. But, if they wanted to accept payments from agents, uh our APIs enable that with the click of a button, with the flip of a bit. Um so, one like kind of unintuitive way of thinking about agentic payments

is it's just basically a config on an existing stack of structure. It's just a different entry point into uh the payment stack that we offer. >> Yeah, and I I I think we're in this like really interesting kind of era of crypto of like, you know, the maturity. Like, there's people at this conference wearing like shirts and ties and jackets. Couldn't be me, but you know, some folks are. Um and and what you want, and I think what the real what we should collectively want, is for the pivot into agents to resemble much like the pivot into the open web, where the internet is was built on open standards HTML HTTP etc.

And that was kind of the bedrock foundation that people could compete to offer the best products and services for. And so, you have uh places like CDP, my former employer, Yuga's current employer, who are really building on top of open standards like X402. And the value prop to businesses is that prevents you from having to rack your own servers. If we go back to the web analogy, like if you wanted to deploy a website in the early days of the internet, like you had to go and provision a server and get like a you know, high bandwidth connectivity to like the internet, and you need to rack it. And like, there's a ton of stuff that you need to do before you actually can drive value to your customers.

And it's the same in crypto right now, right? Everyone wants to use crypto as a payment rail because it's the best payment rail that exists right now. But businesses need they need custody. They they need a story for okay, I have a user and like is this user any I'm obligated to KYC this user and I have compliance obligations. I have reporting obligations. I have I have to do stuff when I touch money. And so you can now what we're what I'm observing is that we're now having many companies uh competing in on top of these open standards that one of them being XPRT, but broadly crypto is a ecosystem is, you know, this open ethos.

Uh these companies can now compete on a living level playing field to provide those those services at scale to enterprises who want to come and take advantage of the excellent infrastructure. >> One of the great examples of what X is talking about, you know, we're we're in a very interesting time as you said where this merging of open and closed, of solo devs and enterprises, of gorilla crypto and tradfi are merging. And we're all feeling our well selves through this space. It's it's that's why it's such an interesting dynamic time. But a a good example of agentic payments that demonstrates this marriage is uh the recent launch of a AWS Agent Core, which is a core offering in Amazon's bedrock

AWS suite. It's basically um a deployment and development tool within AWS that allows uh developers to launch agents. And within within that uh uh Agent Core, there is a key payments component that allows the agents to pay and XPRT is uh a first-class uh method of payment. And what we see these developers doing is building things like marketing agents um that collect um data or creative visuals from models uh using XPRT enabled endpoints. Uh they are research agents that are compiling reports on financial data or um other use cases.

Um so so this is happening and it's real and it's fascinating to think that, you know, something as institutional and as um foundational as AWS uh is already at the frontier exploring how agentic payments um might be used and they're able to do so because XPRL 2 is such an open standard and CDP provides, in particular, but other companies too, provide the infrastructure and harness to leverage that without really knowing too much about the underlying crypto. >> Yeah, and like whenever you're trying to like explore a frontier, there's a certain amount of ambiguity and uncertainty, right? And like a thing I get asked for by the probably my number one question from

large enterprises when I talk to them about XPRL 2 is like what is the compliance story? What is the, you know, how do we what do we need to do? Everyone's very familiar with like oh, we have a PSP and we know the playbook do X we do one, two, three and then we're like good to go and our like obligation report is this and so and and I think that people think that crypto isn't far along that journey, but it's actually incredibly far along that journey. Like a little known fact is that uh like XPRL 2 has this component called the facilitator. The facilitator is an optional kind of uh it's an optional part of the spec that enables you to delegate some of the operations on chain to a third

party and that reduces the barrier to entry significantly if you're a business. It means you don't have to become an expert in uh interacting with blockchains or managing hot wallets. You can kind of push all that to someone else who already has developed that uh that uh competency. And CDP has this facilitator, it's very good. It's one of the larger ones. There's a bunch of these facilitators that compete and those but one of the key value props of the CDP facilitator is that it KYT and OFAC sanctions screens all the transactions that go through it at Coinbase grade security and compliance. And so, that kind of helps you I'm not a lawyer I don't want to give people legal advice, but that is like roughly the

compliance obligation that you have as a business is to not act with to understand your transactions and to not interface with sanctioned actors. And so, there are things that you can do like removing barriers to entry and doing safe things by default that drop the uh drop the barriers of entry for starting to experiment for enterprises dramatically. And so, this this really I think uh big businesses tend to be conservative for good reason for excellent reason and what we're starting to see in England's is is companies realizing like oh, this is not as high a hurdle as I thought it was and maybe it's worth it is it's

worth putting an oar in the water and like seeing ex running experiments and seeing how these things work. >> Yep. That said, you know, we're super excited you know, if anybody from uh G-SIBs are in the room, we're we're excited to have you use XRO2 using CDP. Um but it is very much that magic moment like when I remember you know, when Open Law came out and then uh Multihub uh or Multibook rather came out and there was that magic moment moment where you could just point your agent at that MD file that was hosted online and then it would just set up everything up on its own. Um it's a there's a similar moment I think for XRO2 that as as the institutions come on chain,

um as as this technology proliferates throughout the enterprise stock, people are going to get more and more bought in. Um we're approaching the end of our talk, so want to reserve a few minutes for hot takes uh around executive payments and so, I'll give mine. Um mine is that if 2025 was the year of vibe coding, I think 2026, maybe going into 2027, we'll see, but really 2026, given all the IPOs coming up, is going to be the uh year of vibe trading.

The there are echoes of uh 2020 here, but the difference in 2026 is that these this vibe trading is all going to happen agentically. And there's going to be this virtuous loop of people who want in on action of like, you know, pre-IPO stocks and all these things that are being enabled by um prediction markets, um decentralized exchanges Coinbase etc. etc. Um they're going to want to spin up agents that are hooked on hooked up to various data sources to be able to decision for them. Agents are going to need to be able to pay autonomously for those data sources, so uh without human in the loop, and lo and behold, XRP 2 is going to be uh the best method of payment for that, so that

these agents are going to need a crypto wallet. And then they're going to trade out of those same crypto wallets to trade and make a profit for their humans. Um the reason I think this is going to happen is because it's actually, you know, we have a product that's similar to this at Coinbase, and it's extremely fun uh to use. Uh you don't have to know too much uh if you have a thesis, you can actually delegate a lot to your agent. Um and it seems like a very organic usage of agentic payments where um the access data is critical fuel for driving intelligent decision-making that the agent can do. So, uh if vibe trading becomes a phrase, you heard it here first.

>> I like it. I like vibe trading as the as the next one. My I think my um you know, we only have 2 minutes left, so I'm going to give a very hot take, and then uh and then promptly exit stage left. Uh I think my hottest take right now in in really AI broadly is it's shocking how mundane AI is. Like we have created synthetic intelligence and like the best that we can come up with so far is uh productivity maximalism.

Which is like remarkably mundane, you know? And it makes me think that we're kind of in the we're sharing research papers era of the internet where you know, you the internet started as a way for academics literally that is literally to share research papers with each other. And the thing that we all experience now is the internet is like dramatically more interesting and uh more powerful than that. Not you know, the fundamentals of the pipes are the same, but it's really the capabilities that make it interesting, right? Like the internet got more interesting not necessarily just with increasing the bandwidth between computers, but also with the

capabilities of like, "Oh, you can render a JPEG. Oh, you can create interactions with JavaScript." And uh I to loop this back in why it's an agenda commerce take is I think that payments are one of the things that make AI less mundane and makes AI much more interesting. Like it is just simply more interesting if your agent can access hidden information that isn't publicly available and you know, do things. One way to think about it is like if your agent is just tokens off the faucet it is the same as everyone else's cuz it has the same capability of search, it has the same capability it's trained on the same corpus. Like if both you and I are using you know, chat GPT 5.5, we're getting

the same stuff. But it's when you give your agent access to secrets, to proprietary stuff, to you know, interesting parts of the web that are not hidden because they're valuable that are hidden because they're valuable, does your agent become as interesting as possible. And so, I really want to make agents more interesting. >> And with that, we'll leave you. Thank you so much. >> [applause]