Coinbase launches Agentic Wallet for USDC agents

Coinbase announced Agentic Wallets on Feb. 11, 2026, a wallet designed for autonomous agents to hold, send, trade and pay USDC. The wallet is accessible through an awal command-line interface and, in a reduced form, through an MCP-compatible payments client. Authentication uses an email one-time passcode and private keys remain inside Coinbase’s trusted execution environment.

The product provides two integration paths. The awal CLI exposes the full feature set for developers building agents in code. An MCP payments package supports discovery-and-pay flows for environments that only need to find and pay for services. The MCP option does not support sending funds or executing trades. Coinbase separates Agentic Wallet from AgentKit/CdpX402Client, which serves as a buyer-side wrapper for typed x402 API calls.

Developers must run Node.js 24 or newer and have an email address. Installation uses the skills package and the awal CLI, for example npx skills add coinbase/agentic-wallet-skills. Authentication is a two-step email OTP flow: running npx awal auth login user@example.com returns a flowId and triggers a verification code to the email, then npx awal auth verify <flowId> <otp> completes login. The npx awal status command reports server health and authenticated state and supports a –json flag for automation.

After authentication, the CLI provides commands to manage USDC. npx awal address returns the wallet address and npx awal balance [–chain] reports USDC balances. npx awal send <amount> <recipient> [–chain] sends funds. npx awal trade <amount> <from> <to> executes token trades on Base mainnet only. Additional commands include npx awal show to open a companion window and npx awal quit to stop the background wallet server. Supported chains for balance and send are base (default), base-sepolia, solana, solana-devnet and polygon; trading is limited to Base mainnet.

Agentic Wallet includes built-in x402 discovery and payment commands. npx awal x402 bazaar search <query> finds services and npx awal x402 pay <url> executes payments. Coinbase’s launch materials reference more than 50 million x402 transactions at the protocol level. For MCP-compatible hosts, developers can install npx @coinbase/payments-mcp to enable discover-and-pay flows; that MCP path does not provide send or trade capabilities.

Coinbase documents programmable security controls for Agentic Wallets. Private keys are stored inside Coinbase’s trusted execution environment so keys are not exposed to an agent’s prompt or LLM context. Session caps and per-transaction limits can be set to restrict spending during unattended agent sessions. Know Your Transaction screening can block or refuse signatures for high-risk counterparties or transactions.

Coinbase also describes options to enable persistence for wallet sessions and to enable or disable anonymous telemetry. Developers are advised to enable persistence if needed, set conservative session and transaction caps, and test with a small Base USDC balance before funding production balances.