Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on Sunday pushed back on the notion that crypto founders should abandon the sector for artificial intelligence, arguing the two are complementary rather than competing.
The advice to "pivot to AI" is "the wrong way to think about the world," Armstrong wrote in a post on X, describing crypto as general-purpose infrastructure, like electricity or the internet, that underpins new technologies instead of competing with them. AI agents will eventually "transact far more per day than all humans combined," he said, and need real-time programmable money because they cannot open bank accounts or wait days for a wire.
The comments come as some of the largest bitcoin miners do the very thing Armstrong cautions against. Companies including TeraWulf and Core Scientific have spent the past year repurposing mining sites into data centers for AI computing and signing multibillion-dollar hosting deals, and their shares have outrun bitcoin itself in 2026.
Armstrong's counter is that crypto's place is not to be traded away for AI but to serve as its payment rails.
He pointed to Coinbase's x402 payment protocol, its Base network and the USDC stablecoin, which he said "power the vast majority of all agentic payments."
Armstrong branded the emerging category "Agentic Finance," or AiFi, and called it "what Coinbase is building."
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to turn company announcements on X into news stories. I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)