Coinbase Head Of AI: Agentic Finance Is The Biggest Opportunity In Fintech (Full Explanation)

**Robbie Klages** (0:00)
Alrighty guys, we are back here at the Tokenization Tower for episode number 41 of AI Supercycle, our weekly premiere AI show powered by our friends at Nier. Visit nier.com and nier.ai to learn more about their private inference product. We've got Lincoln Murr, Lincoln, welcome to the tower.

**Lincoln Murr** (0:13)
Thank you for having me.

**Robbie Klages** (0:13)
Good to have you, man. You are the lead of AI at Coinbase, X402, Agents, all of this is happening fast. Just ended a conversation there with Lucas, the VP of Research at Galaxy, I think is your friend, he was speaking a lot about what that is and kind of like why this tokenized inference, tokenized compute market is really growing. So why don't we start kind of here, but before we do just a quick intro on yourself, what do you do at Coinbase? How did you get started there?

**Lincoln Murr** (0:42)
Yeah, yeah, so I've been at Coinbase for about two years. I lead all the different AI products. So that's X402, Coinbase for Agents and Coinbase Advisor.
I've been in the crypto space since I was like 11 or 12 I got started because I needed to buy a VPN so I could pirate video games. And the only way I could buy that is by turning a Target gift card into Bitcoins on LocalBitcoin. I've been involved ever since. Prior to that, I was doing research at the Ethereum Foundation. But yeah, Coinbase is now the new home.

**Robbie Klages** (1:06)
Beautiful, man. And so this kind of AI crypto crossover has happened very fast. And I think we should start with that's kind of like financialization part of it first, which is this kind of growing desire to have tokenized inference and tokenized compute markets. And we've seen different companies come out of SF that have launched compute marketplaces and there's this kind of growing demand to basically speculate on compute prices or hedge your exposure via if you're a data center owner, et cetera. And then simultaneously, there's also this push to really reduce the cost of inference. Right now, we're seeing this kind of like narrative unfold. I think today, Ford put out an article that was like the headline was like, we replaced all the workers, but AI costs more. And so there's kind of like this drive to lower the inference costs as well. So you got this open source inference providers and this marketplace is kind of gaining steam.
Maybe just kind of unpack your view on the financialization of the AI stack. We'll start here and we'll get into some more of the product side of things.

**Lincoln Murr** (2:05)
Yeah, totally. And in my view, and I think this is something that Sam Altman directly said, which I really like, the whole idea of inference or intelligence is now just becoming a utility. And this is only that electricity or water or anything else is. And part of that process is naturally going to be the explosion of its use, but then also the continual decrease in the cost of it, as well as the ability for people to have better piping and infrastructure through which they can buy or speculate or even hedge their exposure to this new utility. All of these financial primitives, or at least a large part of them exists today for these existing utility markets. And I suspect we'll see this continue over time. But the great thing about tokenization, as we all know, is that it makes it just so much cheaper, faster, more efficient for these markets to exist and for them to proliferate.

**Robbie Klages** (2:47)
Yeah. And so from the product side of things, do you see marginal improvements from having tokenized compute markets or tokenized inference markets or open marketplaces? Is it a cost thing? Is it an efficiency thing?
What does it really enable?

**Lincoln Murr** (3:01)
Yeah, I think the biggest one and the most obvious one to the vast majority of people, that's valuable, is just speculation. If you think that the compute resources are going to become larger, there's an ability to speculate on that, where today people can't get access to OpenAI or Anthropic besides some pre-IPO shares of that. It's just a more direct, pure form of speculation, which I think is broadly what we've seen in the crypto space recently, with prediction markets being a great example of that.
Beyond that, though, if you're a large company and you want to replace X percent of employees with AI, or you anticipate having a bill for compute over the next however many years, you can use these new tokenized structures and whatnot to very seamlessly hedge against that cost, go into the millions of dollars per cent. It's a nice way for people, and the same way that you have farmers who sell their futures on corn futures markets for larger enterprises and tech companies to sell compute or buy compute to help hedge against issues there.