Coinbase has launched Payments MCP, a way for agents to get onchain via x402, enabling LLMs to access a wallet, onramp, and payments.
As Coinbase’s x402 Foundation launches in partnership with Cloudflare, this release marks an additional step that contributes to agentic commerce, where AI agents analyse and recommend, as well as act in the global economy.
Agentic commerce developments
Payments MCP offers AI agents onchain financial tools, including wallets, onramps, and stablecoin payments, accessible through natural language. An MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a blueprint that allows AI models to access external tools and services safely.
Coinbase believes that crypto rails, specifically stablecoins, are a key payment infrastructure for agentic commerce, as they operate at the speed of code, integrate easily with APIs, and allow autonomous agents to act without human intervention. Payments MCP aims to be the bridge between intelligent automation and real-world economic participation.
The new rollout allows users to experiment with agentic commerce via capabilities such as wallet creation, email sign-in, a customisable interface, an integrated x402 Bazaar Explorer, and built-in guest checkout and onramp, all running locally on desktop. The solution has been verified and tested to work with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and Cherry Studio, making it accessible and compatible. Support for these LLMs will be coming in the near future.
The move comes as agentic AI evolves to not only be able to read and write, but to transact and do. Payments MCP offers agents the ability to take action in the global economy autonomously, enabling them to pay for compute, retrieve paywalled data, tip creators, or manage lightweight business operations via x402.
This enables LLMs to natively connect to the crypto economy and payment protocols such as x402. Additionally, users can configure spending limits and manage permissions to ensure agents operate within clear bounds.
X402 is an open, web-native payment protocol that enables instant stablecoin payments directly over HTTP by reviving the long-unused “402 Payment Required” status code. x402 lets APIs, apps, and AI agents transact easily by embedding payments into standard web requests, delivering pay-per-use monetisation without subscriptions, accounts, or manual checkout flows.
