The news: Coinbase debuted Payments MCP so that AI agents can access on-chain wallets, blockchain onramps, and stablecoin payments, per a blog post.

Why this matters: Coinbase is making investments to become the dominant crypto payment rail in the post-GENIUS Act landscape. As stablecoin and agentic payments enter the mainstream, consumers will be looking for the most convenient rail to run both.

Crypto on the rise: Multiple payment players are getting in the ring to facilitate stablecoin and crypto wallet-powered payments.

• Stripe launched its Open Issuance platform and Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) in partnership with OpenAI at Stripe Tour New York.
• Fiserv debuted its own stablecoin platform and coin, FIUSD.
• Square and Shopify announced stablecoin acceptance at the point-of-sale (POS).
• Google Cloud is developing its own blockchain, the Google Cloud Universal Ledger.
• Mastercard is in the running to buy BVNK’s crypto infrastructure.
• And Visa unveiled the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) last year. 

Tepid consumer interest: While crypto companies and crypto enablement surge in the payments sphere, consumer interest isn’t keeping pace. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, crypto payment adoption is negligible—and the No. 1 reason for paying with crypto is payee preference, not personal interest.

Our take: Crypto payment rails don’t yet have market consolidation at the scale of the Mastercard-Visa duopoly. Crypto platforms that enable a broad range of commerce can lock up dominant positions as more mainstream payment platforms facilitate crypto and more retailers accept it.