Like many other companies, Coinbase has recently sought to expand its operations using AI. The cryptocurrency exchange acquired Agara, an AI support platform, in 2021 to expand its customer experience tools. Nearly three years later, CEO Brian Armstrong said in an X post that his development team witnessed their first “AI to AI crypto transaction.”
“What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens,” Armstrong said.
Coinbase partnered with Perplexity AI to give traders access to real-time crypto data, CEO Brian Armstrong said in an X post this July.
“Perplexity is now ingesting our market data, including COIN50, and using it to power market analysis,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong, who cofounded Coinbase in 2012, said he was enthusiastic about the tech during a “Cheeky Pint” podcast episode published in August 2025.
“Even as CEO, by the way, I use it a lot,” Armstrong said, adding that he and the Coinbase team are testing the limits of decision-making in AI.
“We use a decision-making process called RAPIDS, and everyone writes their input,” Armstrong said. “We have a row now for AI that writes its input in as one of the people that help make decisions. We’re testing the limits of it. Like, when can it actually start to be the decision-maker on some things and do better than humans?”
During the same interview, Armstrong said he fired Coinbase employees who hadn’t adopted AI into their workflow before a given deadline.
“Some of them had a good reason because they were just getting back from a trip or something,” Armstrong said. “Some of them didn’t, and they got fired.”
