Introducing Payments MCP: Bringing Financial Autonomy to AI Agents
September 11, 2025
TL;DR Coinbase is launching a first-ever solution to connect popular LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to the crypto economy, equipping it with a wallet to transact onchain and autonomously pay with stablecoins.
Today, we’re excited to announce Payments MCP, a Coinbase-built Model Context Protocol (MCP), that gives AI agents seamless access to embedded wallets, onramps, and the ability to transact onchain - opening the door to fully autonomous AI that can participate in the global economy. This is all accessible directly though a prompt window without complex configurations or technical know-how.
What’s Happening
Many of our favorite large language models (LLMs) are already designed to assist and automate tasks at a high level. They’re also capable of interacting with various tools via MCP servers.
Think of an MCP like a phone app: it expands what the device can do. For an LLM, that could mean adding payments, search capabilities, or file storage as part of its workflow. With Payments MCP, users give agents the ability to hold a wallet, access Coinbase onramps, and execute transactions on-chain, all with natural language prompts.
This release represents the next step beyond AgentKit, Coinbase’s earlier agent integration toolkit. Unlike AgentKit, Payments MCP works with any client that supports MCP tools, which today covers most LLM environments. It also introduces sign-in with email and OTP, mitigating the need for developer knowledge or API keys. The demo video below shows Payments MCP in action, highlighting how ChatGPT can now autonomously engage with the onchain economy.
Why It Matters
The future of AI isn’t just about reading and writing - it’s about doing. Payments MCP unleashes a ready-today use case for agentic commerce, letting AI agents interact with the world financially and autonomously.
Financial autonomy for AI agents: With Payments MCP, your favourite agents can pay for cloud services, retrieve paywalled data, tip creators, or even run simple business operations without human intervention.
Stablecoins as the best-fit tool for agents: Traditional payment rails are built for humans and are slow or rigid. Stablecoins move at the speed of code, integrating directly into APIs, making them a natural fit for autonomous agents.
First of its kind access: This is the first time a widely used LLM has direct access to the crypto economy and payment protocols like x402, bridging AI and decentralized finance.
Extending developer possibilities: Developers can now build agentic applications that weren’t previously feasible, like AI that can fund its own operations, pay for compute, or participate in tokenized ecosystems. Previously complex workflows can now occur dynamically and autonomously, enabled by a simple natural language command from a user that uses x402 to search for services to provide a solution.
What’s Next
Payments MCP is just the beginning. We’re committed to expanding agentic commerce tools, supporting additional LLMs, and exploring new protocols that let AI safely interact with financial systems. Developers can start experimenting today, and we’ll be sharing tutorials, demos, and resources to help bring these ideas to life.
With Payments MCP, AI moves from thought to action: holding wallets, making payments, and interacting with the blockchain. And giving developers the building blocks to create the next generation of autonomous agents.
About x402
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. By embedding payments into standard web requests, x402 lets APIs, apps, and even AI agents transact seamlessly—unlocking frictionless, pay-per-use monetization without subscriptions, accounts, or manual checkout flows.
Learn more about the work that Coinbase Developer Platform is leading with x402 here: https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform/products/x402
