Why Coinbase wins in an AI-native finance world
The bull case for Coinbase as a $300B company in 2031.
TL;DR: Most view Coinbase as a crypto brokerage that trades in line with Bitcoin and crypto trading volume. This narrow view misses the long term upside of Coinbase in a world of $3T of stablecoin supply and $7.5T of agentic commerce by 2031. Coinbase accrues value as the co-creator of USDC with favorable stablecoin distribution agreement with Circle and as the creator of x402 and Base – where agentic commerce primarily happens today.
Intro
Artemis is a digital finance research firm that focuses on onchain data. We helped McKinsey estimate real stablecoin payment volume, written extensively about Agentic Commerce and what digital finance looks like in 2030. As crypto and AI converge, Coinbase will no longer be just a crypto exchange. It is becoming the settlement, distribution, and commerce layer for AI-native finance.
Most view Coinbase as just a crypto brokerage that is cyclical and trades along with crypto trading volume.
Not surprisingly, Coinbase trades in line with other brokerages like IBKR, Robinhood, Schwab
– versus Circle which captures a much higher multiple (103.9x NTM earnings) as a pure play bet on stablecoin growth.
Coinbase can become a $300B company (6x from today, 35% CAGR) in 2031 as the primary winner of stablecoins and agentic payments — NOT just as a crypto exchange. See our full model here.
Our core assumptions:
Stablecoin supply hits $3T of supply in 2031
Agentic commerce volume reaches $7.5T in 2031.
We make the same assumptions on the core exchange business as the street - ~$6B in transaction revenue by 2028.
The market misses the fact that Coinbase benefits and wins from two generational tailwinds:
The rise of stablecoins and demand for digital dollars globally. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent forecasts stablecoin supply to reach $3T in 2030 (up 10x from today). Bain & Co thinks supply will be 12x by 2030, or $3.8T.
The rise of agentic commerce. McKinsey forecasts $3-$5T of global agentic commerce by 2030 and we predict 1/3rd of all commerce volume will settle onchain and leverage agentic payment protocols like x402, MPP, etc. We currently see on chain the rapid growth of agentic payments happening on blockchains:
Coinbase is a clear beneficiary of both these tailwinds and accrues value as the #1 largest and most regulated distributor of USDC and for having the #1 network for agentic payments.
Even when institutions are skeptical of DeFi and see crypto as “dead”, Coinbase will win not because of crypto and exchange trading volume but by being the most trusted and dominant stablecoin platform and payments infrastructure for agents.
Why Coinbase is winning from stablecoins
The market doesn’t understand that Coinbase is a clear winner from stablecoin growth – even when crypto trading volumes go down, stablecoin usage has continued to trend upwards historically.
The USDC distribution agreement is a Coinbase asset, not a Circle one. Circle’s share-of-revenue paid to Coinbase has climbed from 32% in 2022 to roughly 50% in each of the last two years. The structural reason is straightforward: Coinbase earns roughly 100% of the yield on USDC held in its products and a meaningful share of off-platform balances under the Payment Base waterfall. As Coinbase’s distribution grew (Q4’25 average USDC held in Coinbase products hit $17.8B, an all-time high), its waterfall share grew with it.
From an investor’s standpoint, the agreement is closer to Coinbase outsourcing the regulatory and reserve-management work to Circle than to Circle paying Coinbase for distribution. The Collaboration Agreement runs in 3-year terms and auto-renews provided that three thresholds are met (Product, Company, and Reseller). Public filings indicate that, if those thresholds are satisfied, “the Circle Agreement cannot be terminated.” The renewal mechanism is not a renegotiation cliff — it is a continuation lock. For Circle, walking away would mean cutting access to the largest single distribution channel for USDC. For Coinbase, the upside scenarios (regulatory clarity drives stablecoin payments to scale, USDC market cap expands meaningfully) flow directly through the same contractual share. The contract is structured to compound Coinbase’s position regardless of who runs Circle.
Future Growth of USDC
Outside of Coinbase, we also see many interesting use cases for USDC, especially in emerging protocols. We’ve seen growth in USDC supply in protocols like Polymarket, Hyperliquid, MakerDAO, etc., which has increased drastically over the past two years. As new financial use cases emerge on blockchain platforms, we see USDC continue to be used in these protocols.
Coinbase is in a good position to capture the next wave of stablecoin use cases, payments. Payment types on card rails (B2B, B2C) have all increased significantly over the past year, and USDC has been gaining share in these types of transactions.
When looking at address to address transfers of USDC, a proxy for these types of transactions, we can see USDC gaining share against USDT.
Is the market misinterpreting CLARITY?
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (H.R. 3633), commonly referred to as the “CLARITY Act,” passed the U.S. House of Representatives on July 17, 2025 by a bipartisan vote of 294–134. The bill would establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets other than payment stablecoins. For Coinbase, the CLARITY Act represents the most consequential piece of pending U.S. legislation in the company’s regulatory environment, and would establish a substantially complete federal regulatory architecture for the digital asset ecosystem in which Coinbase operates.
The CLARITY Act’s relevance to Coinbase’s stablecoin economics is also greater than is widely appreciated. Coinbase’s distribution and reserve-share arrangements with Circle generate a revenue stream that, on current rate assumptions, rivals the issuer-level economics earned by Circle itself, and Coinbase’s USDC rewards program contributes a further line whose ultimate scale depends on how the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise is finally drafted. The market underweights the magnitude and durability of these stablecoin-linked revenue lines and treats them as adjuncts to the exchange business rather than as core infrastructure economics in their own right. The CLARITY Act, by formalizing the broader regulatory architecture in which stablecoins clear, settle, and circulate — and by clarifying the registered intermediaries through which institutional stablecoin flows transit — strengthens that argument. It reframes Coinbase’s stablecoin franchise as the application layer of a regulated and rapidly institutionalizing system, rather than as a discrete consumer product line whose value rises and falls with retail token trading volumes.
Why Coinbase is winning agentic payments
Most investors think Stripe ($159B as of Feb ‘26) and Tempo are the clear winner of agentic commerce but a look at onchain metrics shows otherwise: 92.8% of real agentic payments volume happens on Base, while 99.8% are settled in USDC.
And of all agentic payment volume, over 99.8% of it happens on x402, the open payments protocol pioneered by Coinbase.
AI agents are shifting from assistants that answer questions to systems that transact on a user’s behalf, buying APIs, data endpoints, compute, inference, and services at sub-cent unit economics and machine speed.
Existing card rails were not designed for this. A typical card transaction carries a roughly $0.03 to $0.04 fixed cost before interchange, which makes a $0.003 API call uneconomic by two orders of magnitude. Stablecoins settled on high-throughput L2s clear for fractions of a cent in seconds, and require no human in the loop to open a billing relationship.
McKinsey projects $3 to $5T in global agentic commerce sales by 2030. Gartner estimates AI agents will intermediate over $15T in B2B purchases by 2028. Both numbers are directional and should be treated as such; however, what is not speculative is that if any of it materializes, it structurally prefers stablecoin rails, where USDC is already the default and Coinbase benefits directly.
The scoreboard
The x402 standard, an HTTP-native micropayments protocol co-developed by Coinbase (now managed by the Linux Foundation), has become the leading open protocol for agent-initiated payments. Since October 2025, x402 has processed +180M agentic payments, moving $47.5M in agent spend across over 5K merchants selling to agents.
When merchants make their services accessible for agent consumption, Coinbase’s L2 and USDC are already the default payment rails. Additionally, Agentic.Market gives Coinbase a path to own resource discovery. If agents use it to find, evaluate, and route to x402 services, value accrues not just through Base settlement and USDC volume, but through Coinbase’s position as the marketplace coordinating agent-to-service transactions.
How Coinbase monetizes
Coinbase captures agentic payment economics through four lines that compound around the stablecoin pillar: USDC float, Base settlement, CDP / AgentKit monetization, and Agentic.Market distribution.
USDC reserve yield. Coinbase’s highest-upside revenue line is not transaction fees, but float. Agent wallets need prefunded balances to authorize autonomous spend, pay for APIs, cover usage-based services, and settle machine-to-machine commerce in real time. As agents become economic actors, USDC balances held in Coinbase-controlled wallets become recurring, yield-generating deposits. Every dollar of agent-held USDC produces reserve income regardless of how quickly that dollar turns over.
Base sequencer economics. Every x402 or MPP-style transaction that settles on Base becomes a sequenced transaction that can generate priority fees. This line scales with transaction count, not just payment volume, which matters because agentic commerce is likely to be higher-frequency and smaller-ticket than human commerce. That said, sequencer fees are probably the smallest part of the upside because transaction costs trend lower over time.
CDP, AgentKit, and facilitator monetization. Coinbase can monetize the developer layer that lets agents hold wallets, manage permissions, sponsor gas, settle x402 payments, and interact with paid services. This includes facilitator fees on x402 transactions, wallet infrastructure, gasless transactions, key management, policy controls, and enterprise-grade developer tooling. If CDP becomes the default infrastructure stack for agentic payments, Coinbase earns platform revenue even when the end payment is low-value.
Sizing the upside
We assume $5T of annual agentic commerce by 2030. Most of this will still route through cards, ACH, bank payments, and account-to-account rails, especially for large-ticket consumer and enterprise purchases. But machine-native, high-frequency, cross-border, API-based commerce will disproportionately use stablecoins and payment standards like x402 and MPP.
We estimate that ~20% of agentic commerce settles through stablecoin rails, implying $1.0T–$1.5T of annual stablecoin-based agentic payment volume. Illustrative bull case revenue math is below:
USDC float: $200B of average agent USDC balances × 4% reserve yield × 50% Coinbase-attributable economics = $4.0B
CDP / AgentKit / facilitator / Agentic.Market: developer subscriptions, wallet infrastructure, x402 facilitation, marketplace routing, provider analytics, and distribution fees = $750M
Base sequencer: $250B–$300B of agentic payment volume on Base, across tens of billions of transactions, at low per-transaction economics = $250M
This points to ~$4.25B of annual Coinbase-attributable agentic revenue. The important takeaway is that real value accrues if Coinbase becomes the operating account, developer platform, discovery layer, and settlement rail for autonomous commerce, which they have already made large strides towards in the past several months.
Why Coinbase and USDC wins
Coinbase’s advantage is that it controls four reinforcing layers of the agentic payments stack: USDC float, Base settlement, CDP / AgentKit infrastructure, and Agentic.Market discovery.
USDC is already the default settlement asset, which means builders integrate it first because it has the deepest tooling, liquidity, and developer support. Base then benefits as the natural settlement chain for USDC-native agent payments, with low developer friction and growing facilitator coverage. CDP and AgentKit sit one layer higher, giving developers the wallet, key management, gas sponsorship, and payment infrastructure needed to make agents economically active. Finally, Agentic.Market can become the discovery and routing layer where agents find, compare, and consume x402-enabled services. A competitor entering this market would need to replicate liquidity, settlement, developer infrastructure, and distribution simultaneously – while each new agent, merchant, and service makes the existing Coinbase stack harder to displace.
Conclusion
The market views Coinbase as a crypto exchange and misses that they are building the platform for AI-native finance. Global leaders forecast $3T in stablecoin supply and $5T in agentic commerce by 2030, and stablecoins have already decoupled from crypto prices. Coinbase has positioned itself to be a winner in that world and is showing an early lead. x402, USDC, and Base have become the de facto stack for agentic commerce, with each layer commanding a +90% share against competitors. Coinbase is uniquely positioned, having developed Base, incubated x402, and earn a favorable share in USDC economics. The mispricing has three legs. The Circle agreement is structured as a continuation lock, not a renewable contract, which means the stablecoin revenue line is durable rather than at risk. The CLARITY Act formalizes the regulated infrastructure layer Coinbase already operates, repricing the franchise from consumer product to core market plumbing. And the four-layer agentic stack (USDC, Base, CDP, Agentic.Market) compounds reflexively, with each new agent and merchant making the moat harder to attack. Coinbase should trade closer to the infrastructure comp set than the brokerage one. We think Coinbase becomes a $300B company off the back of these generational tailwinds, with the majority of revenue coming from subscription and services lines like stablecoins and agentic commerce.
Disclosure: This material is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other form of advice. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be relied upon as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. The authors or affiliated entities may hold positions in the assets discussed. You should conduct your own research and consult appropriate financial professionals before making any investment decisions.