Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: AI ‘should have crypto wallets’

Armstrong’s statements come as Coinbase launches a $15K bot accelerator.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently launched an artificial intelligence accelerator grant program to award $3K to five projects focused on combining AI with crypto wallets.

According to Coinbase CEO Brad Armstrong, large language models (LLMs) — the technology behind AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude — could accomplish finance-related tasks if they were properly equipped.

“LLMs should have crypto wallets. Let’s help AI agents get work done (on your behalf) and participate in the economy.”

Economically empowered AI

Coinbase engineering lead Yuga Cohler posted a demo of the “AI Wallets” feature to X on Aug. 12. In the demo, Cohler demonstrates a scenario where an organization is paying people to participate in human-feedback sessions to train an image recognition model.

The system prompts Cohler to choose which image he “thinks is best” from three different pictures. Once he makes his selection, and thus fulfills his task to help train the AI, the model is able to send his payment directly to his cryptocurrency wallet.

This scenario evokes a bit of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk wherein humans are paid for completing simple tasks online. However, there are any number of conceivable use-cases for giving an AI system the ability to conduct and receive wallet transactions.

Developer incentives

The Coinbase Developer Platform announced its $15K accelerator grant program for the purposes of exploring those use cases. According to language on the Coinbase website, the company is looking for pretty much any useful “bot” built using an LLM and connectivity to Coinbase’s MPC wallets.

Per Coinbase, the grant is designed to test the waters of AI-induced economic applications:

“A major barrier to building useful applications with AI is that AI agents can’t get a bank account to send/receive automated payments. Building onchain fixes this.”

Those interested in applying for the grants have until Sep. 5 to submit their applications.

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