Coinbase users are complaining about receiving multiple push notifications per day urging them to “predict” sports gameplay during “March Madness” college basketball.

Indeed, so many complaints were reported via X that it became a trending topic yesterday.

Many customers, echoing allegations by state attorneys general in Michigan and Arizona, described the annoying promotions as de facto advertisements to gamble on sports.

Coinbase, is one of the longest continually-operated bitcoin (BTC) exchanges which safeguards billions of dollars’ worth of assets for customers.

However, rather than focus on long-term investments like BTC, Coinbase regularly floods its app with short-term promotions, all-or-nothing predictions, memecoins, leveraged derivatives, and other high-risk wagers. 

Full-screen promotions tempt many users into risky trades while many customers don’t see a single mention of BTC during their entire Coinbase app experience.

Indeed, the homepage of the app as of Protos’ last check, featured a “March Madness” advertisement at the top of the homescreen with no mention of BTC above the fold.

One customer and Coinbase stockholder posted screenshots of the basketball notifications, which arrived several times daily. “This is essentially encouraging me to gamble,” he wrote.

‘Very bad for our industry’

CEO Brian Armstrong responded the same afternoon, calling it “a fair point” and promising customization options. However, the concession only drew sharper criticism.

Alexander Leishman, founder of BTC exchange River, replied to Armstrong: “It’s long term very bad for our industry to be pushing sports betting. The blowback will impact all of us.”

Days earlier, a Messari researcher had posted a nearly identical complaint. “Why am I getting notifications from Coinbase about betting odds for college basketball games?” he wrote.

“This is just reinforcing the notion that crypto is just another gambling product, and not an actual investment to be taken seriously.”

Crypto attorney Ariel Givner compared the moment to Juul’s rise and fall.

Other users were more blunt. “Every time I open your d*** app, I’m getting bombarded with gambling notifications,” one wrote, tagging Coinbase directly.

Stablecoins could benefit from the rise of AI-driven payments over time, even as early adoption remains limited and contested, according to a new report from Bernstein.

In a Monday note shared with Cointelegraph, the broker said stablecoins could help unlock machine-to-machine payments by making microtransactions viable and enabling programmable, conditional payments between software agents without a human in the loop.

But Bernstein said traction so far has been limited. The note said Stripe and Tempo’s machine payments protocol recorded about $5,000 in stablecoin volume in its first week, while Coinbase’s x402 protocol handled no more than $25 million over the last 30 days.

Bernstein’s chart put x402 volume at about $24 million over that period. x402 is a payment standard developed by Coinbase that lets AI agents automatically make payments over the internet.

The bigger point for Bernstein was that stablecoins do not need machine payments to succeed in order to keep growing. The note said stablecoin demand is already being driven by cross-border business payments, remittances, card-linked products and neobanking, making AI payments an upside case rather than the core thesis.

The report follows growing interest in autonomous payment solutions. On Thursday, Visa’s crypto division launched a tool allowing AI agents to make same-day payments, while Stripe-backed Tempo launched its blockchain and payment protocol.

Bernstein said broader payment use cases are still the real growth engine for stablecoins. Its note estimated total stablecoin payment volume rose to $375 billion in 2025 from $213 billion in 2024, led by consumer-to-consumer flows, while business-to-consumer, business-to-business and consumer-to-business activity also increased.

Related: Stablecoin issuers and fintechs race to own payment rails

Coinbase, Circle remain best “proxies” for stablecoin adoption

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and stablecoin issuer Circle remain the “best proxies for stablecoin upside” due to their USDC (USDC) partnership, according to Bernstein.

It also argued that USDC is likely to capture a dominant share of machine-payment activity because it is the most liquid and regulated stablecoin among likely candidates.

So far in 2026, USDC recorded $2.4 trillion in adjusted transaction volume while Tether’s USDt (USDT) recorded $1.4 trillion.

Wash trading concerns cloud early metrics

Some of the headline machine-payment numbers have already drawn skepticism.

AI Agent payment volume on x402 only amounted to $1.6 million after applying the wash trading filter developed by Artemis Analytics, which is significantly lower than the initial $24 million reported by news outlet Bloomberg, according to a16z partner Noah Levine.

“$1.6 million is not a big number. But the infrastructure being built around it is,” wrote Levine in a March 11 X post, adding that x402 was already integrated by the likes of Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel and Google’s agent payments protocol.