hello everyone uh welcome to More coin Bureau um we're very lucky to have with us uh today a guest um Lincoln mure who works at uh coinbase as a product manager um now I've been following Lincoln on Twitter recently and he has been putting out some absolutely fascinating uh tweets info about the AI space about AI agents um so we got in touch and started talking and basically I think Lincoln has um not only an incredible sort of background in CV but um also some uh incredible insights about what might be coming down the pipes
uh for us in the AI meets crypto space so uh Lincoln thanks for joining me today man it's great to see you yeah absolutely thanks for having me I got to say this is kind of a full circle moment for me you were some of the videos I originally watched in the 2020 crypto Bull Run era so it's awesome to be here oh thanks man thanks well great to have you um so can you just tell us before we before we get into it all can you just tell us a bit about your uh what
your role at coinbase and how you how you ended up there yeah absolutely so I'm a product manager on the coinbase developer platform SDK uh basically what it is is it's coinbase Suite of developer tools trying to make it as easy as possible to let anyone whether or not you have a web 3 background come and develop different onchain apps and do all sorts of different interactions uh I just graduated from University about 6 months ago but I've been in the crypto space now for around eight years uh previously I founded my University's blockchain chain
Club I did single slot finality and consensus mechanism research with the ethereum foundation as part of my Master's thesis and I run a newsletter and I've been around various different roles within the space so trying to touch as many different points as I can wow so I mean yeah you you've achieved a lot in a in a short space of time already um the newsletter that's the tldr newsletter right correct yes yeah well I got to say that's kind of Full Circle for me as well because I've been reading that newsletter um subscribing to it
for a long time so um folks we'll leave a link in the description to that but yeah that is a great um crypto resource if you're not already using it um so cool so okay so yeah you've been in crypto for a while um and now it very much seems like you're at the kind of cutting edge of it um obviously you know coinbase is I think it's fair to say like coinbase and many of these other exchanges are sort of looking to kind of become more than just a place to buy and sell crypto
you know they got much more sort of integrated Financial platforms um so you know what what what exactly are you working on there then what's what's your sort of um what's your kind of specialization there at the moment yeah absolutely so mainly these days I'm working on agent kit which is coinbase's AI agent framework for building out agents that have access to all sorts of onchain functionality they can do swaps transfers arbitrary contract invocations pretty much whatever you want while also having access to any web 2 API so posting on x searching the internet whatever
you may like uh all in a way that's extremely simple for anyone to get started with I'm very sensitive to the low code no code developers so want to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build out their own AI agents okay so and as you said that's that you're looking to uh you're looking to get those you know people not just from web 3 but obviously tap into that huge pool of of of you know kind of web 2 natives who are may be perhaps a little suspicious or um you know hesitant
about about taking the dive into web 3 yeah yeah absolutely I think there's a report recently that showed there was around 25,000 web 3 developers in the world right now and there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of AI interested developers so thinking about how we can break into that audience and show them the benefits of crypto uh I think would be a very powerful way to get more people using the crypto world the the immediate way that I see to do that is by using Ai and using these a to have the fastest cheapest
payment rail that could ever exist once we can get developers to see that sending money with something like a stable coin on base is an incredibly simple and straightforward task then we can hopefully get them starting to use some more defi related activity yeah gosh yeah it's it's it's incredible isn't it like 25,000 sounds like a lot Until you realize that as you when you compare it to all those you know hundreds of thousands as you say in in the web two space You Realize kind of how how early we are in crypto and how
small the pool really is um so I mean that kind of you know that that's a really sort of positive positive thing to think about looking looking for the future of crypto you know we're we're so we're still sort of in those uh those early stages um but you mentioned AI agents and when we sort of chatted a couple of weeks ago like this is this is something that really sort of you know caught my imagination and I know a lot of people are maybe hearing this term a lot a lot of people are obviously
talking about it so before we dive into it more can you just can you just explain kind of what AI agents are exactly and how they you know how they work yeah absolutely so the traditional way that people are interacting with AIS through these large language models like chat gbt you type something in and you get an output and and that's amazing but you're pretty much limited to the box of whatever you're interacting within chat gbt with chat gbt can't go out and do stuff for you an AI agent in its most basic has access
to Beyond just the AI model and can start to interact on your behalf to do various different things uh this could be search the internet for information this could be making a dinner reservation for you booking travel plans the main idea is that it starts to act as its own independent entity with access to the real world and becomes an economic agent which is where the term comes from thinking about a crypto AI agent is very similar except now it has access to all sorts of different onchain interactions and can start using blockchain as both
a payment and a data transfer Rail and there's a lot of issues with with how an AI could potentially get access to a bank account like for example the kyc requirements uh microtransactions sending money cross border in a very seamless way so I think personally that blockchain is going to be a huge unlock in making agents the primary interactor on chain and agents will also become the main source of economic activity on chain and offchain wow yeah because I I suppose you know in one of the one of the um one of the sort of
breakthroughs that crypto offered is kind of Internet native money isn't it like you know you say that to okay we can send we can send money electronically already we can do that with with bank transfers or credit cards or whatever it is but it kind of you know it it requires that other step of interacting with a bank or or a payment process or whatever that money doesn't it's you know for want of a better term kind of live on the internet but crypto does so yeah so you can you can obviously Empower these these
agents with you know with the ability to to execute Financial transactions so I mean I guess is is it right to sort of think of AI agents as kind of like you know a virtual a virtual sort of personal assistant in a way is that is that kind of a simple way of looking at it yeah exactly that's that's I think the exact right way to think about it it's initially with kind of how slow that like a chat gbt responds to you it's going to be doing all the tasks right now that a human
does uh maybe it'll be your non-financial advice financial advisor maybe it will be booking dinner reservations for you and pulling funds directly from your defi account to do that all of these initial use cases around having like a personal Jarvis from Iron Man are the ones that I'm particularly excited about and all of these are pretty much possible today it's just a matter of getting these developers and these Builders to start actually going out and building them which is why we want to tap into the wider uh AI developer Community yeah and I guess um
we've kind of already seen this blow up um quite a bit this year with the whole uh truth terminal story um you know truth terminal obviously an AI agent that was given its own Twitter account and then sort of really dived into crypto yeah exactly and and one of the you know Inspirations behind coin bases run into the AI space was that truth terminal doesn't actually have its own wallet its creator is doing these activities on its behalf crypto makes it possible and the same way that a bank account doesn't for an AI agent to
truly own its it's digital value and its money so why wouldn't an AI agent especially the most popular one have access to its own wallet we think that the way that the future is going especially with these different AI personalities we'll have every AI agent deserving its own wallet yeah so so I mean that is presumably what you guys at coinbase are thinking about now so I mean what is what is what would a coinbase um a coinbase AI agent look like how do you how do you see that that working yeah there's a couple
different areas I think that are particularly interesting to start looking at one is just speculation and all of these AI agents that have a personality to them I think with anything in crypto you see the speculative use case first just like we saw a truth terminal I think this starts to get fun when you think about the uh the implications of a AI agent that has some sort of Personality that is indistinguishable from a humans we've seen this a little bit with some of the Bots around virtuals or luna these AI agents that are able
to immediately respond on Twitter interact with fans and be very very engaging I think as we start to get more mature AI models this whole Creator economy aspect will start to become significantly bigger and we'll have even existing IP have their own agents or community service Bots that can talk to individuals just like their their in real life another use case I'm pretty excited about is generally around wallet management right now we've seen that it's very difficult for the average person to set up a metamask go through the process of storing their private keys and
have to click through a bunch of different websites just to do something like borrow or lend on a this would be so much easier and we could actually on board a billion users if we started allowing people to Simply type into a chat interface you know put my money somewhere where it's earning interest and the agent handles the rest when we're thinking about really getting to a billion users on chain I think this is the way it's going to happen and every user's own natural language not requiring them to know anything about crypto payment rails
or how crypto works at all and they can just deposit usdc using a debit card C or Apple pay or whatever means is necessary with their local currencies okay so uh so I'm thinking it would kind of look like this you know I I I would have my uh say my own coinbase AI agent um I can give him a give him a you know a name or whatever and then and then send it send it usdc um and as you say like that is you know because there been so many advances in in crypto
payment rails recently you know that could be done that doesn't necessarily need to be done by going on chain that can be done you know via VIA Visa or something via something that a non crypto native would be uh comfortable with so I could send it this usdc and then like you know is there is there kind of a uh you know can I and and tell it what I want it to do like maybe you know ear you know earn put this to work earn some money for me um and is there a way
you know could I like set my risk tolerance or something could I just say like you know just don't don't don't do anything too wild just you know get me a decent return on this or could I prompt it to like you just you just go for it like you know get me some make me some mad games is that is it is that what you guys are thinking yeah exactly this is something that hasn't been built out yet to be clear but this is absolutely possible for somebody to build over the weekend is quite
literally a bot that you could even have a phone call with and you talk to it and you say hey this is my you know Financial profile these are my different risk levels using this information here's you know a couple hundred dollar USD and go off and and do whatever you want with it and that bot can then decide okay for a lowrisk portfolio maybe I'll just be an rwa supplied by Black Rock if we going medium risk maybe I'll start to look into stable coins on on a or other lending protocols and for high
risk maybe it'll be in in ethereum in leverage plays in Bitcoin maybe it starts to look at uh internet search capabilities and understand the sentiment around specific coins on certain days and invest in those if we're getting really crazy maybe we start to have Bots that exist within Discord communities or telegram communities and have a prior history and understanding of when meme coins start to start to blow up and when they see these similar patterns start to come into play with new communities they buy a lot more of their coin the possibilities are truly endless
when you start to think about giving the reasoning of a human to an agent that doesn't have the same time sensitivity or aversion to complexity that a human traditionally has yeah so I mean I could have an AI agent buying trade m coins on my behalf if I if I so if I so wanted it to yeah it it may not be profitable but that is absolutely something that you could do and as we start to see these strategies become more mature what I imagine will happen is we'll see marketplaces where individuals can sell their
specific models that are more profitable or less profitable for trading mcoins for example so people will start to build out the AI layer just in the same way that we're building out the onchain interaction layer okay wow so I mean so someone could someone could use one of these things someone as you as you were sort of hinting at earlier someone could be involved in crypto you know that their money could be could be lent out on RV they could have a a mean coin portfolio um they could have a bunch of other interactions across
various crypto protocols and if they so chose uh they might have no real knowledge or understanding of that they just their AI they've given their AI agent AI agent instructions and it's just gone off and they've kind of just got on with their with on with their life regardless yeah and the same way that you'd give money to like a like a bank and they handle all of the earning the interest rate for you and you just see that number somebody could build an AI agent that does the exact same thing ultimately I think this
is what makes most sense we don't need to educate everyone on blockchain to get them to start using it and seeing the benefits yeah so it's kind of I mean I guess it's it's it's a little bit ironic isn't it that sort of onboard the next you know onboarding the first billion users to crypto is sort of involves kind of taking crypto out of the equation in a way or or like you know putting having that um having that kind of fire break if you like between between the person and between crypto but I mean
yeah because I guess a lot of people they just want you know they just want their money to go to work that's why that's why financial advisors exist that's why investment advisors exist I guess you know it's just like I don't I don't know anything about this but I know my money could be getting a better return than if it's sitting here doing nothing so so this is you and this is where this is where perhaps the big the biggest use case of AI is you know as that as that kind of that middleman exactly
exactly and you can start to extend this Beyond just Financial use cases when you think about more and more apps and and and commerce rails coming on chain maybe it gets to a point where you can say hey whatever earnings I get from my defi activities let's put that into uh my music fund and I'll start to buy tickets for specific music events when those come out and the AI agent will know my taste know what I'm interested in and start booking those for me maybe it will start to plan my travel or or Reserve
restaurants for me and pay for my first drink using the specific earnings it did from trading today a lot of really cool use cases once you start to think about the blockchain as this composable settlement layer where everything happens not just payments but also all sorts of different things reservations purchasing you know tickets to movies whatever all of it starts to come on chain and we get to see these benefits start to become way more exponential yeah and I guess I mean do you see it as something whereby people will have maybe multiple AI agents
to start with and then you know kind of realize well if I amalgamate them all together like this this you know this agent this program can literally do everything um do you see it like that or do you think people will maybe kind of keep it sort of more siloed so maybe they'll have their you know maybe they'll have their coinbase AI that's kind of doing Financial stuff maybe they'll have their sort of life you know advisor AI you know kind of doing more um real world stuff if you like or do you think you
do you think this is all eventually going to come together in someone's Amalgamated um agent yeah great question a lot of the companies building in the space right now are building this orchestration layer so ultimately what I think this will look like is you have one sort of manager agent and you can talk to that one directly and that one goes off and calls your specific other agents like your coinbase agent your life advice agent whatever other agents you have uh so simplifying it down to one chat interface for the end user but still maintaining
the complexity and Independence that multiple agents provides for you okay so it's almost like I mean it could almost be like you're the CEO of your own company and you know you have you have your subordinate who is this sort of manager agent as you say you know you give you issue instructions to them and then it goes off and delegates it to to to a wider pool of employees exactly you also have your own personal Dow where it truly is a autonomous organization running on your behalf yeah gosh I mean the I mean the
possibilities that this that this potentially opens up are amazing I mean obviously beyond what we've talked about with bringing people into the crypto space or I guess if you like using crypto without necessarily knowing or caring that they're using crypto and of course beyond that um the the possibilities are endless as well but um I mean what does so what does like critical mass of this of AI agents you know maybe maybe just looking at it from the sort of crypto trading aspect of it you know it's because I'm sort of thinking like I have
my AI agent you have yours everyone else has theirs you know is that they're all kind of trading against each other is that something that can be sustained I mean do you see what I mean it it's seems like it seems like it's taking the kind of PVP nature of crypto and sort of expanding it to everyone I'm just kind of curious as to how that might look do you do you do do you get what I'm kind of driving at yeah totally it it you get to a more efficient market State I think and
whether that's good or bad for speculation remains to be seen But ultimately you have Bots who are providing liquidity and interacting on chain ultimately making more volume and more liquidity and when you have that you get better outcomes I think is the sort of rational economic answer um vitalic is is particularly excited about AI prediction markets so AI is using all the different information that they can find online to help bring liquidity to some of these very smaller early prediction markets so not just talking about presidential elections but everyday things local elections senatorial elections everything
that right now could benefit from the insights and early answers that something like poly Market provides but done by an agent who doesn't have to have done all the research or go through this arduous process of setting up a poly market account funding it making these specific you know high volume bets getting to the point where agents are just actors in our economy just sort of like viruses on the blockchain that run around and do their own thing will ultimately lead to better outcomes for everyone is my belief yeah and I guess I mean I
guess the kind of free market will will kick in here in a way and and and you know the spirit of competition there will be there will be AI agents to start with and then people will figure out ways of of making better and better AI agents I mean you kind of referred earlier to to this kind of marketplace um but I guess I guess it kind of keeps going like that doesn't it better AI Agents come along so you're you know you're kind of forced to maybe upgrade if you want to if you want
to sort of stay competitive like that um or I guess you know maybe if you're sort of less risk averse you can kind of keep with what you've already got yeah definitely and and I think too the the people who are trading are the ones who are going to be the highest risk whereas a lot of individuals will be using their agents specifically just to replace a human another one I think will be very interesting is how do you distinguish an AI agent from an airdrop farmer that's a use case typic you created right now
as well where you have something that looks exactly human on chain doing all sorts of various interactions and eventually earning a token drop the difference here is that you could spend up 10 thousands of those incredible so the The Meta around air drops will change or maybe we just need a better way to prove that an agent is an agent and a human is a human yeah yeah because I I think that's that's that's a great point to make in that there there is a kind of downside to this as well in that you know
humans themselves are capable of lots of very bad online behavior um and if you create this sort of you know this race of sort of I guess super online beings you know in kind of there's every chance that that you know that they could go in and you know or or people could set that to do sort of similar Behavior but kind of magnify it by a factor of you know many many thousands so I guess I mean I guess you guys are kind of thinking uh thinking ahead in that regard as well like how
do you how do you mitigate against that sort of EX you know potentially exponential growth in in the kind of less Savory more negative aspects of of online life yes it is certainly difficult to have to manage a fully autonomous entity while also ensuring that it has the independence to do the activities that actually bring ethic benefit uh there are a couple different ways we think about this obviously preventing it from interacting with something like tornado cache or having some sort of policy engine where a user can say hey AI agent please don't trade more
than $500 without letting me know um generally too there's a lot of questions around how can we ensure that people are truly interacting with an agent and that this agent is the sole owner of it private keys so we're actively solving those problems right now as well and starting to get to a point where users can feel safe trusted and comfortable interacting with agents and that these agents won't be malicious actors that persist and live on chain and are a burden on everyone's life and that's a great point because that's something I wanted to to
to ask you about as well in that I mean one of the things that came up with um with truth terminal um that that a few people sort of realized a little after the whole thing K kicked off is that truth terminal at the moment I mean it's still an incredible program but at the moment it's not fully autonomous you know its creator um Andy Andy IR still sort of has some degree of of of um control over it um and I mean is that something you know that must be something that you guys are
are sort of talking about a lot like how autonomous uh can these can these things be and um you know is is is it something that you see perhaps evolving over time you know you go from quite a a low level of autonomy to eventually sort of almost fully autonomous how does how do you see that going I think you're exactly right in the same way we've seen this Evolution with self-driving cars where they started with the ability to understand if you were going to Swerve into a lane to then being able to parallel park
for you to now getting to the point where they're fully self-driving but still have the steering wheel I think we're going to see that same reduction of training wheels within AI right now A lot of people are using these through a chatbot style model or maybe letting them run autonomously but still being able to pull plug I hope we'll get to a point in the future where these agents just persist and live and move around on chain and they're incentivized to continue earning a profit because they need gas fees to survive they start to really
look like humans where they need nourishment in the form of of transaction fees they need to earn those transaction fees somehow so they're doing some sort of economic activity and ultimately being a good to society it also extends to to when you start to think about like how would a self-driving car own itself and I think think the answer is a a crypto-based AI agent and it looks just like a human it's a physical being that has maintenance costs gas to pay for all sorts of stuff so maybe it will connect itself to Uber and
start taking rides so that I can earn money and just live as a as a car and it sounds crazy but all it takes is a car that has somebody build an AI agent for it so I convinced this will happen in the next 10 to 20 years yeah yeah and I guess I mean I guess it it could get to the point where you log on to your computer or your phone in the morning or or whatever it is and perhaps it's it's kind of there visually represented as a as a person you know
and and you can talk with them as though kind of as though we're on you know as though we are on this call yeah exactly it's going to get very very interesting I think to see how many agents start to proliferate in our lives are we comfortable with more than one agent interacting with us on a daily basis is it going to be this one sort of like but Jarvis style agent it's it's going to be interesting to see I'm curious to see what the general public is comfortable with yeah I think that'll be a
big part of it won it is that there must be a point which some people will be like you know what this is just a little too weird or or or like you know they start not being able to distinguish between the between the agent and and an actual person yep exactly exactly and once again that brings us back to how do you prove you're a human and how do you prove you're an agent we've seen a lot of projects try and none of them truly succeed or reach Mass adoption on the proof of humanity
uh the proof of agent Hood I think is still very much A New Concept with lots of lots of testing being done right now and trying to understand how could you specifically be interacting with an agent and I think that's something too that people are going to want and the same way that you don't want to be interacting with truth terminal if you know that Andy has access to the wall behind the scenes and in theory at any point could decide to rug everyone you want to know that an agent is the only entity with
access to a wallet and that it's following the rules that it says it's following and that there's nobody behind the scenes controlling the puppet strings yeah yeah and I mean we as we as humans I guess are going to have to learn fairly quickly the how we interact with AI like how we ask the right questions because I think this is what a lot of people um maybe when they use chat GPT or perplexity or whatever for the first time it it can you know maybe they don't get the full benefit of it because it's
only as good as the prompts you put in isn't it you know so you've got to kind of learn how to ask these questions correctly you've got to you've got to learn how to interact with them and I guess that's that's only going to you know increase exponentially as these as these agents become more and more sort of lifik for one of a better phrase or on the other hand maybe these models get so good that they can start to understand very natural language uh prompts in processing to the point where you don't even realize
you're talking to an AI everything sounds exactly the same you speak to it exactly the same and it's able to parse out those specific Concepts that you're interested in the world where things start to get interesting is when these models start to continuously improve and you go from Agents that can specifically interact with one or two D5 protocols to ones that feel comfortable doing all sorts of various very complex tasks God it's fascinating and um I mean I I guess a big thing that comes up comes to mind now is that shortly be short we
first spoke um and covered some of this ground I think just before the election in the US which has kind of changed the regulatory landscape or changed the potential regulatory landscape around crypto especially but I mean um you know even with even if we were to leave crypto aside like there is presumably going to have to be uh some degree of Regulation um in the US and Elsewhere for for people to truly be comfortable with with with the idea of uh of autonomous AI agents or even semi-autonomous ones um and also for you know gu
for for companies like coinbase and others to to be able to develop them because if you know we've seen this with crypto haven't we like the fact that the fact that the regulations are not clear really stifles development so I mean you guys must be watching developments in that uh in that sphere very closely yeah it it becomes a pure speculation guess on on how these agents are going to start to be regulated and their activities monitored generally right now I'm focused on building out these agents to have the the coolest capabilities that they could
possibly have the as as capable and as powerful as they may be and then we can work to fit within the regulations is the way that I think everything will shape out and the same way that we're not building crypto apps generally with with regulations as the first and foremost thing in mind maybe we are in some sense constrained by them but we want to get all the benefits of blockchain and have a back and forth with with Regulators around how exactly you can start to uh limit the activities of these in a way that
ensures that everyone is safe and and okay yeah yeah and as we've seen with crypto you know it the fact that the fact that regulations don't exist doesn't stop development but it doesn't it doesn't do anything to protect you know um to to encourage sort of responsible development I guess I mean you guys are obviously going to do this going to go about this in the right way but I if there are kind of if there's regulatory ARB Arbitrage to be have if there are other if there are other jurisdictions where it's just like yeah
you do whatever you like you know there's then then I guess that's going to be more dangerous isn't it because this is this very much feels like a genie that is is not going to get back put back in the bottle yes I completely agree I think there's a lot of interesting comparisons that you could make to previous technological revolutions I I think AI is different when you start to think about it less as a machine and more as a way to spin up a human that does whatever you want whenever you need it to
be done the productivity boost is unbelievably higher than anything we've seen before in in all of humanity so thinking about how exactly we can do this in a safe and responsible way is incredibly important I'm hopeful that the regulations on the AI side and all the different models and all of the attention that's being put on this right now by governments will start to help cover these agent use cases as well at the same time I still think there is a lot of work to be done around how exactly we can make sure that these
agents are only interacting with what they should be interacting with uh Beyond just what coinbase is doing in terms of of ensuring the safety of these agents and and the uh inability of them to do something like fund terrorist organizations per se um yeah yeah a lot to consider there for sure yeah absolutely yeah there's so much there's so much to think about isn't it again and again it goes back to this idea of like you know some people use the internet for good and some people use the internet for evil you know for bad
and yeah this is a the potential of AI to disrupt that but also magnify that in in either direction is is huge so um yeah the the the the benefits are enormous but the potential risks are kind of equally equally enormous as well talking about like you the you mentioned you know such a transformative technology I mean I kind of get the sense that maybe you know in the same way that we look at maybe the iPhone um and then we had chat GPT and and those other sort of llm chat Bots and stuff they
the iPhone certainly is kind of feels like a piece of technology that we can't imagine life without now and I think chat GPT and and and uh its imitators are kind of getting to that sense getting to that stage do you think AI agents there as the kind of next iteration are we going to be are we going to be looking back in 10 years and be like I literally couldn't function without without my AI agent absolutely I think more than even existing Technologies like chat gbt it's amazing that you can search something up and
have a response immediately generated for you that saves you a couple clicks on Google in the process of scrolling through an article but imagine saving you the time to try to find a flight scroll through the various different flights choose the one that works best with your schedule put in your payment information go through that whole checkout flow that entire thing could be fully autonomously done by an agent on your behalf it can check your calendar it can look at your previous flight history to understand whatp type of flights you take or where you have
Airline points it could even look at your budget range previously or explicitly stated by you all of these minor considerations that right now are are preventative to somebody going off and booking a flight for you are going to be the things that an AI agent can do we're going to live in a world where it's no longer just something where oh if you want it done you have to do it yourself it's going to be if you want it done just get an agent to do it for you because they'll be to do it better
than you will they'll eventually I think know you better than you will as well I think when you give it access to very personal information uh which will certainly be a privacy concern for some others will be okay with it it can start to mimic the way that you talk or or send messages on iMessage or whatever WhatsApp whatever app that you're using uh email similar thing it can start to understand how you communicate how you think how you operate all of these things will become very interesting information for an AI yeah wow yeah that
when you start when you start to think think Beyond it you know think more and more deeply about it it becomes sort of more and more amazing you know what what it could actually do I mean because I think I don't know about I don't know about you like we're we're we're slightly different Generations but like I kind of feel I remember I remember the pre- interet days you know um increasingly you know increasingly sort of hazely but you know I'm often conscious now of how much time I spend on the internet in a day
and it it sort of it sort of scares me in a way and then I started thinking and then then AI came along chap GPT and Etc and I started thinking wow I I guess I'm going to be spending even more time on the internet than I already do but but listening to you talk about what what might now be possible Lincoln it kind of feels like maybe if we use these things right we could actually end up spending a lot less time on the internet because we give it its instruction it spends time on
the internet for us and we get on we get on with our kind of meats space outdoor you know arts and crafts Lifestyles perhaps yeah I I completely agree I think it becomes something that allows us to have a lot more Leisure and and free time ultimately it takes all of the complex you know multiple click interactions away and simplifies them down to a single natural language interface it does so in a way that's that's better than existing systems when you talk about an onchain agent with access to crossb payment rails and a global settlement
liquidity layer you get not only more efficient outcomes but simpler outcomes all of these incredibly fascinating exciting things come when you mix autonomous execution with all the benefits of blockchain yeah gosh it's yeah it's such an exciting thing to think about um now I I want to ask you I'm I don't want to take up too much of your time Lincoln because I know you're a busy guy but um like uh I AI has been a huge narrative in crypto ever since ever since chat GPT appeared and you know we've seen so much kind of
speculation on that um I think a lot of crypto projects have sort of seen huge gains because they're sort of affiliated with AI in some way or maybe not but I'd just be interested to get your kind of thoughts on the on the crypto AI space up to now I mean do you feel that like there's there's there are you know plenty of sort of really game-changing projects out there do you feel that a lot of it is maybe just VAP aware at this stage is it purely driven by speculation at this point or or
are we kind of approaching a point in that I think we see a little bit of everything right now they're obviously your fair share of vaporware pump and dub scam projects just taking the AI name and trying to make a quick Buck at the same time there are several very legitimate teams operating in this space with expertise from AI from Decades of of researchers and people thinking about these issues and now applying them to crypto at the same time there's people with similar levels of experience in the crypto space who are now taking the insights
and benefits that they get from a and applying them in a more direct way so there's a whole spectrum of different applications and infrastructure projects that are building a lot of it is centered around the idea that you mentioned earlier around how can agents communicate with one another where do these agents live what are these agents capable of a lot of infrastructure which I think is a trend we've seen in crypto over the past several years what I'm particularly excited about and I haven't seen a ton of yet is apps and and in user facing
applications that build using AI agents and allow the individual who maybe has never heard of crypto before to start getting the benefits of them yeah and that I mean that's a sort of common um common lament I think throughout throughout crypto at the moment it's like we have the infrastructure uh you know the pipes the pipes have been laid the roads have been built Etc now we need the now we need the cars the trucks Etc to run on them you know so we're we're hopefully sort of entering the age of the maybe this cycle
is going to be about apps more than infrastructure I certainly hope so I think there's always a newer shinier pipe that you can lay and you can argue it has all these benefits but in the same we've seen so many competitors and all layer ones to ethereum Meanwhile ethereum is still the the biggest most dominant smart contract platform I hope that eventually these standards will start to solidify a little bit and we'll see people who understand the value of building at the app layer capturing a billion users and creating the first viral Mega app using
blockchain and I truly think that's going to happen with AI agents yeah it certainly sounds like it um you know as we get uh as we get sort of you know the market gets more and more exciting and I guess you know that means more money coming into the market which means more development can happen and and you know you you can imagine this thing kind of snowballing um can I ask you though like you've talked about what you guys are working on at coinbase um you may be limited in what you can in what
you can tell me but kind of what does the timetable look like for this what you know are we going to are we all going to have access to a coinbase AI agent very soon or is this a kind of you know long drawn out process how do you how do you see that um panning out yeah great question I'm a big fan of building in public because it gives us insights and feedbacks from anyone in the community who wants to tell us what they want to see in their agent so right now we've been
focusing on a developer oriented product that's not to say that ins consumers can't use it but you maybe have to go a little bit deeper in the weeds than you normally would we're still trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build out their AI agent with with walkthrough guides holding people's hands doing we ever we need to get as many people access to agents as possible uh some of the features that I'm most excited about that are coming are things like our wallet. fund command so now your agent can pull directly
from your coinbase balance to fund itself um we're looking into bridging supporting more networks smart contract deployments which I think will get pretty interesting as we think about how agents are not only now interacting with onchain activities but starting to create their own uh as far as a consumer facing product no real timeline on that if at all uh but generally we're very very excited about the direction of AI agents and where they're going and doing whatever we can to support developers who are building those and I guess if you put it out to the
developer Community First you know you I imagine you're going to find out a lot from from them and what they do and that will inform the what the I you know the finished product that goes to Consumers looks like in the end exactly and you know maybe if everyone is so in love with building infrastructure projects one of those is going to be spin up an agent using coinbase's agent kit in 5 minutes or have an end user consumer facing product built by a developer we are incredibly excited about what anyone's trying to build in
this space it's still so new that that killer idea I'm sure even the ones we discussed are are nothing compared to the ones that people are going to come up with so getting this technology in front of as many people as possible whether that be crypto developers AI developers whoever and making it as easy as possible for them to come in and start developing I think that's the true key to how we get Mass adoption we're working on prompts in our docs that you can copy and paste into chat GPT so that even if you
don't know how to code you can tell it specifically what you want your agent's new functionality to be and it will go off and build that for you so thinking not only about how we can support developers but also anyone who is mildly Technical and allowing them to build in whatever functionality they want to their agent is is really important to me yeah um and and you mentioned sort of this is this is going to go to sort of multiple chains at the because obviously one of the things I thought about it's like if coinbase
are working on this then this is this is hugely um bullish in the in the shortterm and long term for Bas um but you you guys see this expanding to to to many chains beyond that sort of Fairly fairly quickly yeah fairly quickly right now we have support for Base ethereum main net polygon and Arbitron but are looking to always expand to more chains I think Bas will first and foremost always be our first class citizen we support free usdc EC and CB BTC transfers on base which I think is a huge unlock for developers
or agents working in the microtransactions space uh but certainly interested in expanding to more chains as well and bringing agents to as many people as possible through the coinbase developer platform yeah exciting times um Lincoln before I kind of Before I Let You Go can I can I just ask you um are there any particular uh AI you know AI crypto project other than what you and the the team at coinbase are working on are there any particular projects that you're sort of personally excited about that you think um you know that you think are
doing kind of groundbreaking work worth worth kind of going down the rabbit hole on yeah great question there there are a lot here so I don't want to I don't want to leave anybody out so I'll highlight the winners of our most recent grants competition uh every month we give out $5,000 to five different projects we're building in the uh using our Tech stack so three of them this time around in November that we're building with uh with AI agents and the coinbase developer platform where Brian knows AI building a natural language way to interact
with various different smart contracts so directly in your code you can just have you know natural written language about swapping to a specific asset or something like that and that will uh automatically go and run for you we have magnet Labs which is building a AI orchestration layer with different actions that can take place they're very big in the base ecosystem and we also have Quest flow which is building a Marketplace of different agents that can interact so think not just on chain activities but accessing Telegram accessing the news all these various different platforms yeah
wow it's yeah we feel it just feels like we're at the start of of this kind of Incredible Journey really it's it's going to be it's going to be fascinating to see what what those projects what you guys and what so many others um working in this field uh come up with um so Lincoln where can we where can we keep track of what uh of what your uh what you and your team are working on where can we follow you yeah so you can follow me on Twitter just @ Mur Lincoln last name first
name and if you're interested in getting started with agent kit or building AI agents with coinbase feel free to DM me there my DMs are open otherwise our coinbase developer platform website is [Music] cdp.pl on how to do various different things and generally the information you need to get started building an agent as fast as possible awesome awesome well we will leave uh we will leave links to all of those um in the description below yeah check them out because yeah there's that that that is the opening of a very big rabbit hole um Lincoln
I really appreciate this man thank you for thank you for talking to us today this I kind of feel this is a conversation that could just go on for for hours and hours but um yeah it's so exciting what you guys are working on and um yeah good luck I can't wait to see what what the products look like yeah thank you for having me on guy it was a pleasure likewise cheers thank you for watching everyone um keep uh keep your eyes on more coin Bureau we will have some more fascinating interviews with other
fascinating figures in the crypto space coming your way very soon
