Why Coinbase Commerce doesn\u2019t fit agent payments
Coinbase Commerce lets merchants accept crypto at a hosted checkout — a human picks a currency, scans, sends. It brought crypto payments to e-commerce, but it is still a checkout: interactive, order-sized, and detached from the API call being paid for. An agent calling your API 500 times an hour cannot go through a hosted checkout 500 times.
Coinbase’s own answer to this is x402 — the open protocol this directory tracks. Instead of a checkout page, payment terms travel inside the HTTP exchange itself, settled in USDC on Base. The projects below are the x402/CDP ecosystem: SDKs, facilitators and wallets built on Coinbase’s agent-payments stack.
What to look for instead
- Payment embedded in the API request, not a separate checkout
- Per-request amounts ($0.001+) with sub-cent network fees
- Programmatic payer identity (wallets + policies, not shopper accounts)
- USDC settlement on low-fee networks like Base