WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Giving AI its own crypto wallet and or access to one would mean it can spend its own money and your own money – this could have huge implications for the global economy and payments.
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Today we’re seeing a new economy emerge – robots buying from robots, or in geek speak and to be more precise machines buying from machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents buying from other AI agents. Cryptocurrency exchange To accelerate this trend Coinbase recently launched an AI accelerator grant program to award $3,000 to five projects focused on combining AI with crypto wallets.
According to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Large Language Models (LLMs) – the technology behind AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – could accomplish finance-related tasks if properly equipped.
“LLMs should have crypto wallets. Let’s help AI agents get work done (on your behalf) and participate in the economy,” he said.
Coinbase engineering lead Yuga Cohler posted a demo of the “AI Wallets” feature to X on Aug. 12. In the demo, Cohler demonstrates a scenario where an organization is paying people to participate in human-feedback sessions to train an image recognition model.
The system prompts Cohler to choose the image he “thinks is best” from three pictures. Once he makes his selection and thus fulfills his task of helping train the AI, the model can send his payment directly to his cryptocurrency wallet.
This scenario evokes a bit of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk wherein humans are paid for completing simple tasks online. However, there are a number of conceivable use cases for giving an AI system the ability to conduct and receive wallet transactions.
The Coinbase Developer Platform announced its $15,000 accelerator grant program to explore those use cases. According to the Coinbase website, the company is looking for a useful “bot” built using an LLM that can connect to Coinbase’s multiparty computation wallets.
Per Coinbase, the grant is designed to test the waters of AI-induced economic applications: “A major barrier to building useful applications with AI is that AI agents can’t get a bank account to send/receive automated payments. Building on chain fixes this.”
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Those interested in applying for the grants have until October 5th to submit their applications.
The post Coinbase CEO says AI should have its own crypto wallets appeared first on Matthew Griffin | Keynote Speaker & Master Futurist.