Brian Armstrong says startups shouldn’t abandon crypto for AI as autonomous software will need money it can spend without a bank account.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong criticized startups abandoning crypto to chase the artificial-intelligence boom, arguing that AI will make crypto infrastructure more useful rather than replace it.
Armstrong said in an X post that the advice for crypto companies to pivot to AI reflected “zero sum, scarcity thinking” and misunderstood how the two technologies could develop together.
As the Coinbase CEO argued, crypto should be viewed as a “general purpose technology,” similar to electricity or the internet, rather than as a technology competing directly with AI.
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Coinbase Bets on AiFi
The comments come as several crypto companies have either shifted toward AI or tried to combine the two sectors.
- Crusoe, a cloud-computing company with roots in Bitcoin mining, sold its mining business in 2025 to NYDIG, a Bitcoin-focused financial services firm, as it shifted toward AI infrastructure.
- Other companies with ties to Bitcoin mining, including CoreWeave, TeraWulf and Applied Digital, have made similar moves by redirecting computing capacity toward AI data centers.
Armstrong argued that autonomous AI programs will eventually need to hold money and borrow funds without opening conventional bank accounts or waiting for bank transfers.
Coinbase has a direct commercial stake in that vision. It developed x402, an open payment protocol for software to pay automatically for data, computing power and other services, and operates related wallets and payment infrastructure through Coinbase Developer Platform.
The protocol itself was transferred to a Linux Foundation-backed body in July and is no longer controlled solely by Coinbase. Armstrong called the broader idea “Agentic Finance,” or just AiFi.
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