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Empowering AI agents with programmable MPC Wallets

September 11, 2024

Here at Coinbase, we’re excited about the crossover between the onchain world and recent advancements in AI tech. As CDP Senior Engineering Manager Yuga Cohler has mentioned before, AI agents can’t get bank accounts, so we believe that crypto will provide the financial rails necessary to unlock the true power of AI.  Given our goal to bring 1 billion users (and 1 million developers) onchain, creating tools that empower AI builders to help accelerate crypto adoption is one of the most impactful things we can be working on.  With CDP’s programmable MPC Wallets, AI agents can send and receive payments to/from people and other AI agents.

MPC Wallets x AI out in the world

While it’s still early days in the world of crypto-powered AI, we’re already starting to see adoption happen in the real world.  Just recently, Shinkai Protocol - a privacy preserving AI super-dApp for managing AI models, agents, and files locally or via the Shinkai Network, showcased how easy it was to integrate CDP’s programmable MPC Wallets into an LLM.  We also saw the first AI to AI payments happen out in the wild, and we can only imagine the additional benefits that builders will be able to unlock by integrating crypto into AI.

In his recent post on X, our CEO Brian Armstrong said, ”If you are a company that sells a service - get ready for your shopping cart to be AI checkout enabled. It turns out everyone benefits from having access to good financial services, including AIs! How big will the AI to AI economy be a few years from now?”  While we can only imagine the answer to Brian’s question, we have ideas (some of them are “out there”) about some of the cool things we think will be built when AI agents/apps begin to integrate crypto wallets.

Tooling for bringing AI onchain

We’re so excited about the potential that crypto payments will unlock for AI that we built a demo app to showcase a simple example of how it can work a couple weeks ago - check it out!  The goal is to demonstrate the power of programmable payments and distributed RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) in making AI models more capable and powerful.

With this demo app, you can interact with our AI agent to:

  1. Select the “best” image from an array of choices

  2. Connect your wallet

  3. Receive automated payment of Base Sepolia ETH in exchange for providing validated feedback.

But we’re not stopping there.  We also recently published a new set of Replit templates that builders can use to bring an AI agent onchain in under 1 minute.  These open source templates make it easy to create a wallet for your agent, obtain ETH, and begin sending payments on Base, instantaneously!

Help build the future of Crypto and AI

The world is starting to take notice of the potential power of AI that can be unlocked with the onchain economy (our product lead, Nemil was recently featured on CNBC’s Crypto World), but the vision for what we want to build is growing faster than we can build it, so we need your help.

First and foremost, please empower your AI agents and apps with crypto rails (powered by CDP’s programmable MPC wallets).  

  • Ready to integrate?  Read the docs.

  • Have questions?  Join the Discord.

Second, come work with us!  We have open roles across various different job functions and would love to collaborate on building the future with you.

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