Fireside Chat with Erik Repp (x402) and Yuga Cohler (Coinbase Developer Platform) at ETHConf

Sun, Aug 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

In this fireside chat, Yuga Cohler, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform, sits down with Erik Repp, founder of the X2X protocol and his former boss, to discuss the state of agentic payments. Yuga frames agentic payments as a buzzword that Coinbase thinks about constantly, and after polling the audience finds most have heard of X2X but far fewer have actually done a transaction or had an agent do one. Erik's core takeaway is that agentic commerce is not theoretical: it already happens tens or hundreds of thousands of times a day and is genuinely useful right now, urging everyone to give their agent a wallet and five dollars and try it. With Anthropic's Fable launching that day and models accelerating, they note agentic payments are still nascent at roughly $15 million annualized volume, while X2X recently hit its 100 millionth transaction and around 50 million annualized. Erik explains that the original sin of the internet was having no standard way to declare a payment regardless of the underlying rails, since Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com all differ. X2X provides a well typed schema and standard way of declaring how to receive payment, which creates easy programmable interfaces for agents. Because agents are probabilistic and every credit card form field is another chance to fail, deterministic programmatic tools let an agent simply express intent to pay rather than filling 14 fields. X2X is agnostic to the underlying rail, operating across roughly 15 blockchains including Solana, Base, and Ethereum, plus card rails. They discuss why stablecoins fit agentic payments (microtransactions charging fractions of a cent, programmability, instant settlement), and Yuga positions CDP as Coinbase's version of AWS providing settlement, custody, API and MCP infrastructure, and enterprise controls, where enabling agent payments is just a config on an existing stack. Erik draws an analogy to the open web built on HTML and HTTP, arguing crypto's open standards let companies compete on a level playing field while handling custody, KYC, and compliance. They close with hot takes: Yuga predicts 2026 as the year of agentic "vibe trading" where agents pay for data autonomously via X2X, and Erik argues payments make AI less mundane by giving agents access to valuable proprietary information rather than the same public corpus everyone else has. 00:00 Introduction 00:31 Agentic Payments and the X2X OG 00:52 Audience Poll: Who Has Done an X2X Transaction 01:20 Go Try Agentic Commerce Yourself 01:48 Volume Stats and Anthropic Fable Launch 02:30 Why AI Agents Need to Make Payments 02:36 The Original Sin of Internet Payments 03:22 How X2X Standardizes Payment Declaration 03:46 Why Agents Need Deterministic Tools 04:44 X2X Across 15 Blockchains and Card Rails 05:04 Why Stablecoins for Agentic Payments 05:42 CDP as Coinbase's Version of AWS 06:19 The Infrastructure Stack: Settlement to Custody 07:22 The Edge Determines Human, Agent, or Business 07:46 Shopify and Merchant Acceptance Examples 08:11 Agentic Payments as a Config on Existing Infrastructure 08:32 The Pivot to Agents Like the Open Web 09:30 Why Businesses Need Custody and Compliance 09:53 Competing on a Level Playing Field 10:23 AWS Agent Core Adopts X2X 10:43 Marketing and Research Agents Using X2X 11:57 The Number One Enterprise Question: Compliance 12:27 How the Facilitator Lowers the Barrier 13:20 CDP's Facilitator With KYT and OFAC Screening 13:53 Safe Defaults That Drop Barriers to Entry 14:25 Why Conservative Enterprises Are Coming Around 14:59 The Magic Moment for Agentic Payments 15:21 Hot Take: 2026 as the Year of Vibe Trading 15:50 Agents Trading Autonomously via X2X 16:30 Why Delegating to Trading Agents Is Fun 16:57 Hot Take: How Mundane AI Is Right Now 17:22 The Share Research Papers Era of AI 18:02 Why Capabilities Made the Internet Interesting 18:38 Why Payments Make AI Less Mundane 18:55 Giving Agents Access to Valuable Secrets 19:17 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _