Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Believes Combining Crypto Assets and AI Could Be a "10x Leverage", Opening a New Era for the Digital Economy.
The leading crypto asset exchange Coinbase has just announced a strategic partnership with Perplexity AI to integrate real-time crypto asset data into an AI-supported search tool. Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong stated on the X platform that this is an important step towards expanding crypto assets as a catalyst for AI to achieve a 10-fold breakthrough.
In the initial phase of the partnership, Perplexity will focus on market data from Coinbase, including the COIN50 index, and integrate this information into the new Comet browser. Armstrong shared that what excites him most is the complete integration of crypto asset wallets into large language models (LLMs) in the future, marking a significant step towards a permissionless digital economy.
This announcement reflects a broader strategy to connect artificial intelligence and blockchain, a trend that Coinbase considers irreversible. In 2024, the company has applied machine learning tools to predict sudden traffic increases and adjust resources in real-time, helping to minimize disruptions and improve system performance.
Building a Financial System for the AI Era
Mark Troianovski, Coinbase's Head of Partnerships and Business Development, affirms that crypto assets will become the financial system for AI. As AI agents become increasingly powerful, they will need transparent, secure, and programmable transaction methods, and blockchain is the most suitable choice to meet this need.
Coinbase is focusing on building this future by simplifying on-chain payments for both humans and AI, developing "AI-native" transaction methods, and helping users access crypto asset information directly through large language models. Troianovski also notes that AI's role in on-chain finance will accelerate rapidly, though not without low risks.
While AI can make on-chain data more accessible, Troianovski warns that AI needs to be deployed with appropriate control mechanisms, and the transparency and programmability of blockchain can effectively support this. The AI-crypto asset integration trend reflects the expanding role of artificial intelligence in the crypto asset market, with the market capitalization of AI-related tokens currently reaching around $26.5 billion according to data from CoinGecko.
Although no official release date has been set for Phase 2, Armstrong says this phase will be "deployed soon". The next phase will directly integrate market data from Coinbase into Perplexity's responses, allowing users to track market activities, explore trading ideas, and retrieve information about each token through natural language queries.
