The news: Coinbase is competing to issue a stablecoin for Cloudflare, per a report from The Information.

Coinbase sees Cloudflare’s stablecoin as a central currency for rising agentic commerce given Cloudflare’s position managing web traffic and cybersecurity.

Why this matters: Coinbase is looking for a new, more stable revenue stream after its core crypto brokerage business took a hit from market downturns. 

• The company posted its first quarterly loss since Q3 2023.
• Transaction revenue slid to $982.7 million, down from $1.56 billion the year before. 

A strategic stablecoin partnership with Cloudflare could set up Coinbase to profit from future agentic commerce. With many consumers likely to instruct their agents to execute the cheapest possible payments, Coinbase is set up to win again: Coinbase’s fee cut for use of its payment protocol x402 is 31 cents, undercutting credit cards’ hefty fee structures. That’s especially necessary for the micropayments that frequent Coinbase’s x402 protocol: Its average transaction size is 31 cents, per Artemis.

Zoom out: Beyond a stablecoin partnership, Coinbase is also betting that agentic commerce will give crypto payments a consistent use case. 

At present, crypto payments are driven by payee preference, not consumers’, per the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. With AI agents directing transactions, crypto could become more desirable because it can cryptographically document stages of the payment process to prevent fraud and instill trust for users. 

This could help Coinbase encourage broader consumer adoption of its digital wallet for everyday spending, as consumers will be able to place spending limits and authorized merchant lists to bolster trust in their autonomous agents’ actions.

Implications for crypto providers: Consumer trust is still not ready for widespread agentic commerce. 

• Fifty-eight percent of consumers polled by Deloitte in August 2025 cited security, data, privacy, and hacking as top concerns around agentic AI. 
• And 57% cited AI making poor decisions, errors or unauthorized decisions. 

Until these security concerns are thoroughly addressed, adoption is likely to be slow.