Coinbase Just Flipped the Script--Is This the Real Killer App for Crypto?

This article first appeared on GuruFocus.

Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) is making its boldest bet yet: that stablecoinsthose tame, dollar-pegged cousins in crypto's otherwise wild Westcould become the lifeblood of the AI economy. At its recent Crypto x AI hackathon in Brooklyn, the company gave a glimpse into this future. About 100 developers, some flying in from as far as Italy and Malaysia, stayed up through the sweltering August weekend coding AI tools and bots that transact using digital dollars. At the center of it all was x402, Coinbase's new open-source protocol designed to let machines settle in stablecoins over the internetinstantly, without banks, and for pennies.

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This isn't a marketing gimmick. For Coinbase, it's a strategic pivot away from the highs and lows of trading revenue, and into infrastructure with real-world use cases. With the U.S. now having passed its first federal stablecoin law, the regulatory fog is beginning to liftand the race is on. Stripe recently acquired Bridge and is reportedly building its own blockchain. PayPal launched its own stablecoin, leaning into distribution. But Coinbase's approach focuses on developers. It wants to be the go-to toolkitthe AWS of programmable payments. According to Nemil Dalal, who leads Coinbase's Developer Platform, this is the logical next step in co-founder Brian Armstrong's decade-old roadmap: speculation first, infrastructure second, real-world utility third.

Of course, this isn't guaranteed to scale overnight. Visa and Mastercard remain formidable gatekeepers with massive reach. AI's commercial path is still taking shape. And stablecoins, while booming in countries battling inflation, remain a niche payment method in the U.S. Still, for a weekend in Brooklyn, the momentum looked real. Hackathon teams built bots that could charge per query, marketplaces that didn't need banks, and tools that paid creators instantly. The message was hard to miss: crypto might finally be shedding its casino image, and Coinbase is positioning itself to power what comes next.

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