Why AI Agents Are the Next Customers Businesses Must Compete For feat. Head of Coinbase Business Sid Coelho-Prabhu

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you don't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Sid Coelho-Prabhu, who is the Head of Coinbase Business. Coinbase Business is an operating account that helps you adapt your business to changing consumer preferences and global payment trends. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Sid, learn all about the latest developments with the Coinbase Business platform, enjoy a discussion around agentic commerce, x402, and more. All right, let's get into it.

GM GM. Welcome to the show, Sid. I am excited to have you on today, man.

Hey Narb, good to see you, man.

Yeah, likewise, likewise. I am really pumped for this episode. I'm pretty giddy on the whole agentic commerce scene, x402, and all the other protocols that are developing and evolving in the space. I'm sure our developer audience is really excited as well. But before we get into all that, would you like to give an introduction about yourself?

Yeah, so I'm Sid. I'm a product manager at Coinbase. I run Coinbase Business. I built Coinbase Business a little over a year ago. We can get into why we built it. Before that, I spent a long time building Coinbase Wallet, our self-custody wallet, starting seven or eight years ago, scaled that product, and then took on a new adventure within Coinbase.

Awesome, man. So you're an OG at Coinbase, having been in some of the core areas there. I didn't know you were behind Coinbase Wallet as well. Segueing from that, how did you find yourself in the crypto scene? What gravitates you to the industry?

Honestly, total coincidence. I started my career as an investment banker on Wall Street, then worked in government for a little while, and wanted to build something. So I launched a startup—a modern fintech startup, but very much built on old payment rails, which was very frustrating. One day on a long flight from India to the US, I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and was like, 'Oh my god, this is insane.' I was dealing with all these problems with how broken payment systems were for my startup. Bitcoin felt like the next wave of technology that was going to disrupt and reinvent how payments and money work. I wanted to do that. I started talking to Coinbase, and luckily right around then they were looking for someone to build a self-custody wallet, so I jumped on the rocket ship.

Excellent. I think you made a very wise choice there. Before joining Coinbase, as I understand, you had your own startup called Savvy Investments. Did you want to talk about that briefly and how that experience helped your career trajectory?

Totally. I started my career in investment banking advising Fortune 100 companies on large balance sheets and large-scale financial operations. At the same time, I was reading a lot about personal investments and realized we could take the tooling I used for large companies and give individuals an easy-to-use financial advisory experience. This was the beginning of the robo-advisor space over a decade ago, like Wealthfront and Betterment in the US. I launched one of the first robo-advisors in India called Savvy, where anyone could answer a few questions, get an investment recommendation, connect their bank account, and start investing. But dealing with traditional payment systems was crazy—we actually had to have a fax machine to receive daily operational alerts, and get customer documents by mail to scan and send back. It was that broken. Now in crypto, we're in such a different world, and I love being a part of building it.

A lot of these legacy industries take the attitude of 'if it isn't broke, don't fix it,' but that's not the tech way. Hearing all that, it seems like all those parts led you to Coinbase and developing the Coinbase Business platform. Would you like to give us an overview of what that is and its origin story?

Absolutely. About six or seven years ago, we launched USDC, the stablecoin. We've seen tremendous growth in stablecoins because it's an internet-native US dollar. The US dollar is the lingua franca of global commerce, but using it through traditional rails is clunky, slow, expensive, and full of red tape. When you put US dollars on the blockchain, money moves the same way data does—instantly and anywhere in the world. On Coinbase Wallet, we saw hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide using USDC. But we needed a package for businesses because businesses operate differently than individuals. They need to send invoices supporting crypto payments, run batch payouts to employees, and accept crypto payments on their website. With Coinbase Business, we built a modern fintech platform for businesses as a one-stop operating account for trading, payments, treasury, and high USDC yield rewards—all powered by fast, cheap stablecoins under the hood.

Yes, please show us the demo. Stablecoins and RWAs have bumped up in popularity this year, so it's great people are finally getting the message.

Let's jump into the demo. Here is Coinbase Business. If you're an existing Coinbase customer, we've adapted the core retail product so it feels very familiar. Many customers start with a personal account and add on a business account. You can trade all supported assets including DEX coins, allowing businesses to make investments in Bitcoin or crypto just like stocks.

We have a full business payments suite. You can execute batch payments or regular payouts to send money to anyone globally. You can create payment links for one-time or saved products with flexible pricing, collect customer details, configure redirect URLs, and allow payment in USDC or Tether. Once created, you can send the payment link via WhatsApp or email, and payments settle in less than 30 seconds.

We also have a full-fledged invoicing software where you can input business details, add contacts, and add line items. Top auction houses and car marketplaces use this because it's a professional experience. We offer Checkouts for API integrations on e-commerce websites, a product catalog, and contact lists. We also offer 4.65% interest/rewards on USDC, the ability to borrow against crypto assets, and transaction history. That's the product.

Is this available in selective countries, or is it US-only?

We are relatively new and live in the US and Singapore. We're hoping to open up to new markets in the coming quarters.

Excellent. I'm out of Canada myself, so I'm keen to play around once it's live here. Sticking on the B2B angle, what are the biggest gaps Coinbase Business and stablecoins fill compared to the legacy financial world?

When businesses accept credit card payments, they pay around a 3% fee. If your profit margin is 10% or 15%, that 3% fee takes up 20% of your profits just to accept money. On top of that, businesses deal with chargeback fraud, where customers consume a digital product like AI inference and then fraudulently claim a chargeback. With stablecoins, fees are much cheaper and transactions are final—there are no chargebacks once funds reach the merchant.

The second major piece is serving international customers and global talent. In the internet economy, customers or contractors could be in Azerbaijan, Nigeria, South America, or Southeast Asia. Traditional credit cards often decline international card payments due to false 'high risk' flags. Stablecoins have no borders—US or Singapore businesses can accept checkout payments from anywhere worldwide. Customers like OpenRouter receive global payments quickly with cheap fees. It also makes paying remote designers, engineers, or contractors frictionless.

A lot of people don't realize how powerful that construct is. Now there is a new emerging set of users called AI agents. In my opinion, AI agents and robotics purchases will outpace human purchases in the future. What's on your radar regarding the agentic commerce scene and supporting AI agents?

We've been on the front lines of this. Erik Reppel, an engineering leader at Coinbase, created the x402 protocol, a simple handshake for machines to pay each other. Autonomous agents are being asked to build businesses—buying domains, sub-agents, OpenRouter credits, contractor work, or paywalled research. The easiest payment method for an AI agent is spinning up a programmable crypto wallet. Crypto and AI are a natural pairing. What was missing was enabling businesses to accept payments from agents. That's why we built x402 support so checkouts work for both humans and AI agents.

Amazing. I'd love to see a demo of that.

Sweet. Here is a demo merch store, CoinBiz Merch, selling 0.01 USDC items powered by Coinbase Business checkouts. As a human user, I click 'Buy', scan the QR code using my Coinbase Wallet, approve $0.01 USDC, and the payment succeeds instantly. That's how a human checks out.

Now, what if you want your AI agent to buy this for you? I'll open Cursor AI and ask the agent: 'Hey, can you buy me something from https://coinbiz-merch.vercel.app?' Let's see how the agent handles this.

While we wait for the agent to walk through, maybe you can describe what's going on under the hood.

The agent crawls the URL, inspects available merchandise (hat, tee, mug, stickers), and asks which item to purchase. I'll prompt it: 'Buy a hat.' Every agent operates differently, crawling instructions and checking available API tools or wallet balances. Right now, it's inspecting x402 metadata.

Can you speak to any SDKs, APIs, or developer resources available to start building with Coinbase Business?

The Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) provides APIs for everything. Once you sign up for a CDP account and link your Coinbase Business account, you get access to checkout APIs, wallet infrastructure, onramps, and offramps to build agentic payment flows.

Let's see what the agent outputted.

The agent found hidden x402 metadata in the checkout page's HTML, extracted payment requirements (0.01 USDC on Base), created its own wallet, funded it, and posted the transaction onchain! Here are the order details, transaction hash, and remaining wallet balance. The full agent flow worked end-to-end with no UI needed.

No way! Demo gods prevail! That was fantastic. As a founder yourself, what advice would you share with aspiring developers and founders listening today?

The number one thing after building two successful products at Coinbase is staying very close to customers. Especially in crypto, there's a lot of tech hype versus what customers actually need. Don't focus on your technology; focus relentlessly on solving real customer problems. That's the biggest differentiator.

I absolutely agree. What's the best way for people to follow along with Coinbase Business?

Follow us on Twitter @CoinbaseBiz. Sign up for an account, and if you have any issues getting onboarded, DM me on Twitter. Supporting builders and helping businesses grow is the best part of my job.

All those resources will be in the description below. Sid, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to chat with us. That demo was amazing! Wishing everyone a happy Thursday, and we'll catch you back here tomorrow for another episode of DevNTell. Cheers!