Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company has begun testing AI agents in Slack and email to help employees with work tasks, part of an effort to weave AI into daily workflows. In a post on X, Armstrong said Coinbase has deployed two agents modeled after former executives and suggested agents may soon outnumber human staff.
“Soon, it will be easy for any employee to spin up a new agent for themselves or their team. I suspect we will have more agents than human employees at some point soon,” he wrote.
Armstrong has pushed for greater AI automation across Coinbase. In September he said he wants AI to write more than 50% of the company’s code. The company has also said it aims to make its more than 4,000 employees “AI-Natives.”
The two deployed agents are named Fred and Balaji. Fred, inspired by co-founder Fred Ehrsam, is positioned as a “strategic executive agent” to help employees with strategic clarity, priority alignment and executive-style feedback. Balaji, modeled after former CTO Balaji Srinivasan, is intended as an agent of creativity and disruption to challenge assumptions and spark innovative thinking.
Coinbase has also been active in the broader agentic AI ecosystem. In May 2025 it launched the x402 protocol for agentic AI payments on crypto and fiat rails.
Industry observers expect AI agents to play a major role in crypto. Armstrong has predicted there will soon be more AI agents transacting online than humans. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has forecast “literally billions of AI agents” transacting onchain within three to five years, and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has called crypto the “native currency for AI agents,” suggesting agents will handle tasks from buying tickets to paying bills without credit cards.
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