Coinbase Bets on #Stablecoins to Power AI’s Payment Future

Coinbase has decided that stablecoins are the center of everything. The exchange is now banking on these digital dollars to become the financial engine behind a new era of apps, bots, and AI-powered machines — and it’s already putting that vision into practice.

Over a scorching August weekend in Brooklyn, Coinbase hosted a developer hackathon that drew nearly 100 builders from around the world. From Malaysia to Italy, coders gathered to create prototypes where software itself could send and receive money using stablecoins — bypassing the constraints of traditional banking.

The projects weren’t abstract experiments. Teams built:

A publishing platform that pays writers instantly.

A chatbot that charges a few cents per response.

A group-chat marketplace where users can buy and sell directly, without touching legacy finance.

At the heart of it all was Coinbase’s new open-source protocol, x402, which the company hopes will become the standard payment backbone for AI.

x402: AI’s Stablecoin Payment Backbone

Coinbase’s x402 protocol takes its name from a little-known HTTP error code: 402 Payment Required. Long dormant on the internet, Coinbase is reviving it as a way to let software — bots, apps, and connected machines — charge and settle instantly in stablecoins.

The idea is simple but powerful: whether it’s pennies for an AI-generated image or a few dollars for digital content, payments should flow in real time, 24/7, without #PayPal , #Visa , or a bank in the middle.

“The killer app for crypto, that’s very obvious, is stablecoin payments,” said hackathon participant Ben Reilly, whose team integrated x402 into a chatbot that collected micropayments directly from users.

His teammate, Alvaro Echevarria Cuesta, was blunt about the appeal: “Building your whole financial system on top of stablecoins gives you a lot more freedom than being bound by Stripe, PayPal, and all the restrictions they put in there.”

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