🥛 Coinbase’s "App Store for agents" 🤖

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter serving up “oooh, I get it” moments, daily.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Coinbase’s “App Store for agents.”
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Ethereum to $250K? The Most Bullish ETH Case Ever Made.
🍪 BTC whales had their biggest buying week in nearly a year.

Pharos is an institution-grade layer 1 (L1) designed specifically to bridge real-world assets onchain. Join the Pharos community (X & Discord) here.

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COINBASE’S “APP STORE FOR AGENTS”

Yesterday, Coinbase flipped the switch on Agentic.Market.

It's a storefront where AI agents shop for capabilities they don't have - and it's already plugged into an ecosystem doing real volume.

Think of it like the App Store, but for robots. 👇

Source: Agentic Market

Say your agent needs something it can't do on its own - maybe it’s real-time data, or image generation, or flight bookings…

Instead of you hunting down APIs, creating accounts, and managing billing, the agent finds the service itself. Pays for it. Uses it. Done.

It basically solves the ‘AI agent x human UI’ problem.

Because agents don't browse the internet the way we do (no accounts, no "forgot password" emails, no typing in 16-digit card numbers)…

They need a machine-readable discovery layer built for how they actually operate. That's the gap Agentic Market is trying to fill.

And there's already real activity underneath it. The x402 protocol (the payment rails co-built by Coinbase for machine-to-machine transactions) is already gaining steam:

165M+ transactions.
~$50M in volume.
~100k services listed.
480k agents actively buying.

Source: Artemis

And all without a single API key, account, or login.

… ok, but (of course) the age-old question still persists:

Why do we need crypto rails for this?

A LAYER 1 BUILT SPECIFICALLY FOR RWAs

This is one of the biggest narratives in crypto right now:

“Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization is one of blockchain’s biggest use cases.”

But here’s the catch:

Very few blockchains are actually built for RWAs.

One of the few is Pharos.

Unlike general-purpose chains, Pharos is an institution-grade layer 1 (L1) designed specifically to bridge real-world assets onchain.

Here’s what stands out:

Purpose-built for RWAs
High performance execution for institutions
Infrastructure that connects onchain and offchain systems

This is not just another L1. It’s built specifically for RWAs.

Join the Pharos community (X & Discord) here.

COINBASE’S APP STORE FOR AGENTS (P2) 🤖

We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating:

We believe AI agents will use both traditional and onchain payments, depending on what they’re buying - with crypto being the method of choice for micropayments.

Stripe needs accounts. Credit cards ne ed humans clicking buttons. And both come with fees ($0.30+ per swipe) - making high volume, sub-cen t transactions kinda pointless.

(Or insanely expensive at the very least.) 👇

Source: Claude

Crypto is not only cheaper by orders of magnitude - it also settles instantly, works globally, and never sleeps.

That's why machine-to-machine commerce is getting built on crypto rails first.

Now, you've probably seen the pitch before…

“One day your personal agent will book your flights, negotiate with hotels, research your trip, and mock up an itinerary while you sleep.”

Which sounds awesome (and it is)!

But anyone who's actually tried to wire up an AI agent across multiple platforms knows the painful reality…

Every service has its own API… its own authorization flow… its own billing setup… to the extent that stitching it all together is a full-time job in itself.

Agentic Market collapses all of that into a single, one-time command that sets up everything you need.

Source: Agentic Market

Run the command once, and your agent walks away with:

A way to pay (a crypto wallet).
A way to communicate (via the x402 protocol).
Access to a searchable directory of ~100k services.

Everything else, it discovers and buys on its own.

Neat! So where does this leave us?

Standards don't become standards until everyone is using them.

Coinbase is making an early play to become the default layer where agents find each other and transact. Being first doesn't guarantee you win the category.

But it's a hell of a head start (just look at Apple & Google’s dominance in the web2 mobile app space - they’re unrivaled!).

We're still early in this build-out - but if agents actually do become the way we get stuff done online (booking, buying, researching, trading), they'll need a place to find and pay each other.

Coinbase is betting that place is Agentic Market.