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Coinbase Trials AI Agents on Slack and Email

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Crypto Breaking News

Coinbase is accelerating its internal use of AI by piloting agents that assist employees with day-to-day work, including integration with Slack and email. The rollout marks another step in the crypto exchange’s broader push to weave artificial intelligence into its operations, a trend unfolding across the tech sector as firms lean on automation to cope with hiring constraints and scale knowledge work.

In a post on X this weekend, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong announced that the company has already deployed two AI agents modeled after former Coinbase executives. He suggested that the number of agents could eventually exceed the company’s human headcount, signaling a future where AI handles a growing share of internal tasks and decision-making. The comments come as Coinbase has publicly foregrounded AI as a strategic lever, including ambitions to push more of the company’s coding work toward AI-assisted workflows.

Coinbase’s AI push sits within a broader industry context where tech giants have been trimming staff while expanding AI capabilities. Armstrong has been explicit about ambitions to automate more workflows, including a notable claim last year that AI could contribute to a substantial portion of the company’s code. The exchange has also highlighted plans to transform its workforce into “AI-Natives,” a goal it described as part of its productivity strategy. In parallel, Coinbase operates the x402 protocol, a framework introduced to enable agentic AI payments on crypto and fiat rails, illustrating how AI agents could move beyond internal use to handle real-world financial transactions.

Key takeaways

  • Coinbase is testing AI agents to support internal work processes, with a Slack and email workflow integration as the initial environment.
  • The two agents are named Fred and Balaji, each designed with distinct roles reflecting Coinbase’s culture and governance needs.
  • Fred serves as a strategic executive agent, while Balaji acts as an “agent of chaos and creativity” to challenge assumptions and spark innovation.
  • The initiative aligns with Coinbase’s broader AI strategy, including a push toward an AI-native workforce and the x402 agentic AI payments protocol.

Coinbase’s AI agents: Fred and Balaji

Armstrong introduced the two agents with a nod to Coinbase’s history. Fred, named after co-founder Fred Ehrsam, is envisioned as the company’s strategic executive agent. In practice, Fred is meant to help teams maintain strategic clarity and align priorities, offering executive-level feedback that can guide high-impact decisions. Balaji, modeled after former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, is described as the “agent of chaos and creativity.” The intent behind Balaji is to push employees to rethink assumptions, explore unconventional approaches, and catalyze innovative thinking across projects.

The naming of the agents is not just symbolic. It signals Coinbase’s approach to embedding AI into leadership and ideation processes—using AI personas that mirror the company’s own leadership archetypes to guide how the agents prompt, critique, and shape workstreams. The experiment also reflects a broader trend of “agentic” AI, where digital assistants aren’t merely task bots but integral partners in strategic initiatives and experimentation.

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From internal pilots to a payments rails ecosystem

Coinbase’s internal AI experiment sits alongside the firm’s ongoing broader AI strategy. In May 2025, Coinbase rolled out the x402 protocol to enable agentic AI payments on both crypto and fiat rails, a development that signals how AI-driven agents could eventually perform real-world financial transactions within a regulated framework. The x402 framework is positioned as a precursor to widespread use of AI agents for financial operations, potentially expanding the scope of automation from internal productivity to customer-facing and partner-facing payments processes.

Armstrong’s public remarks this year have underscored a belief that AI agents will increasingly transact online, with him suggesting that “more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon.” Those views echo similar forecasts from other tech leaders who see AI agents as a new class of actors in the digital economy. Earlier commentary from Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has — at times — pointed toward billions of AI agents operating on-chain within a few years, highlighting the scale at which such agents could participate in financial ecosystems. While these predictions illustrate a powerful narrative about AI-enabled commerce, they also place Coinbase’s initiative within a wider debate about governance, reliability, and the regulatory considerations surrounding automated agents in finance.

Industry context remains nuanced. While industry leaders have celebrated the potential of AI agents to reduce friction and accelerate decision-making, they have also warned of the challenges involved in aligning AI behavior with corporate goals, maintaining security, and ensuring accountability when AI agents act on behalf of human teams. The emergence of agentic AI in crypto payments—still in its early stages—will likely attract close scrutiny from investors, regulators, and users alike as practical pilots mature and scale.

What to watch next for AI in crypto tooling

Investors and builders should monitor how Coinbase scales its internal AI agent program: whether traditional workflows see measurable productivity gains, how governance and oversight evolve as agents take on more complex tasks, and what new security and compliance controls emerge as agents interact with internal systems. The broader crypto industry will also be watching for how the x402 protocol evolves, and whether other exchanges or crypto companies adopt similar agent-based models for payments, settlement, and governance-related processes.

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Beyond Coinbase, the momentum around AI agents in crypto payments raises questions about the mix of internal automation and external-facing capabilities. As major players debate the balance between automation and human oversight, the market will likely see a split between tasks that benefit most from AI-assisted decision-making and those requiring direct human input or regulatory compliance checks. For now, Coinbase’s two-armed experiment with Fred and Balaji signals both the ambition and the caution that define enterprise-grade AI in crypto—an approach that blends internal productivity gains with a longer-term bets on how AI agents could reshape the payments landscape.

Readers should watch for updates on the agents’ performance metrics, any expansion beyond internal Slack and email tasks, and how regulators respond to increasingly autonomous decision-making within crypto infrastructures. As Armstrong and his peers push the envelope on AI-native operations, the coming quarters will test whether the promised productivity gains translate into durable competitive advantages while preserving the trust and safeguards that define responsible crypto innovation.

Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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MicroStrategy Makes Biggest Bitcoin Buy Since 2024, Will It Move BTC Price?

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MicroStrategy Makes Biggest Bitcoin Buy Since 2024, Will It Move BTC Price?

MicroStrategy has made its largest Bitcoin purchase in over a year, adding 34,164 BTC for $2.54 billion at an average price of $74,395.

The move lifts its total holdings to 815,061 BTC, extending its lead as the largest corporate Bitcoin holder.

Executive Chairman Michael Saylor signaled the buy a day earlier with his usual chart post on X. Markets read it as another accumulation signal—and they were right.

MicroStrategy is Buying Near Breakout Levels

The timing stands out. Bitcoin has been trading close to Strategy’s average cost basis of roughly $75,500, placing the firm near breakeven.

Strategy has a pattern of stepping in around key levels rather than waiting for deep pullbacks. This latest purchase is also a step up in size. The company bought roughly $1 billion worth of BTC the week prior and $330 million the week before that.

The acceleration suggests growing conviction at current price levels.

Recent analysis from Coinbase shows that large, consistent buyers like Strategy reduce the liquid supply of Bitcoin. Coins move off the market and into long-term holdings, tightening available float.

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That effect becomes more important when Bitcoin is already near a technical breakout level. At those points, even incremental buying can help push price higher, triggering momentum traders and systematic funds.

Strategy’s latest purchase absorbed more than 34,000 BTC in a single week. For context, miners produce roughly 450 BTC per day, meaning the company bought the equivalent of over two months of new supply in one move.

Bitcoin Supply Squeeze, With Limits

Still, the impact is not guaranteed.

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Coinbase notes that the price effect of large buyers can be muted if the market already expects the purchases, or if flows from ETFs, derivatives, or macro conditions outweigh them.

In other words, Strategy’s buying tightens supply in the background. It matters most when market conditions are already leaning bullish.

Strategy continues to fund its purchases through its capital programs, including its STRC preferred stock. The company still has significant capacity to raise funds, giving it room to keep accumulating.

With over 815,000 BTC now on its balance sheet, Strategy is steadily moving toward its long-term goal of 1 million BTC.

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The post MicroStrategy Makes Biggest Bitcoin Buy Since 2024, Will It Move BTC Price? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Kelp DAO hits back at LayerZero for trying to shift the blame after a massive exploit

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Kelp DAO hits back at LayerZero for trying to shift the blame after a massive exploit

The popular Spiderman meme showing three identical superheroes pointing fingers at each other is having its crypto moment today.

Kelp DAO is set to push back on LayerZero’s post-mortem of Sunday’s $290 million exploit, which essentially blames Kelp, a L2 source familiar with the matter told CoinDesk. Kelp plans to dispute the cross-chain messaging firm’s claim that it ignored repeated warnings to move away from a single-verifier setup. CoinDesk has reviewed and verified the memo Kelp plans to publish.

Kelp is a liquid restaking protocol that takes user-deposited ether, routes it through a yield-generating system called EigenLayer, and issues a receipt token, rsETH, in exchange.

LayerZero is the cross-chain messaging infrastructure that moves rsETH between blockchains, using entities called DVNs (decentralized verifier networks) to verify whether a cross-chain transfer is valid.

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On Saturday, attackers drained 116,500 rsETH, worth about $290 million, from Kelp’s LayerZero-powered bridge by poisoning the servers that LayerZero’s verifier relied on to check transactions.

Kelp, the source said, is planning on saying the DVN that was compromised via what it calls a “sophisticated state-sponsored attack” was LayerZero’s own infrastructure, not a third-party verifier.

Attackers compromised two of LayerZero’s own servers that check whether cross-chain transactions are legitimate, then flooded the backup servers with junk traffic to force LayerZero’s verifier onto the compromised ones.

All of that infrastructure was built and run by LayerZero, not Kelp, the source claimed.

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The source contested LayerZero’s framing of the “1/1 configuration” as a fringe choice made against guidance. LayerZero’s post-mortem said KelpDAO chose a 1-of-1 DVN setup despite expressing recommendations to configure multi-DVN redundancy.

A “1/1 configuration” means only a single validator must sign off on a cross-chain message for the bridge to act on it, leaving the system with no second check to catch a compromised or forged instruction. A multi-validator configuration (such as 2/3, 3/5, etc.) ensures there is no single point of failure that can approve a forged message on its own.

They added that, through a direct communications channel with LayerZero, which has been open since July 2024, they produced no specific recommendation for Kelp to change the rsETH DVN configuration.

LayerZero’s own quickstart guide and default GitHub configuration point to a 1/1 DVN setup, the source told CoinDesk, adding 40% of protocols on LayerZero are currently using the same configuration.

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The configuration Kelp ran also appears in LayerZero’s own V2 OApp Quickstart, where the sample layerzero.config.ts wires every pathway with one required DVN and no optional DVNs. That’s the same 1/1 structure.

Kelp’s core restaking contracts were not touched, and the exploit was isolated to the bridge layer, they added. Its emergency pause, 46 minutes after the drain, blocked two follow-up attempts that would have released an additional ~$200 million in rsETH.

CoinDesk reached out to LayerZero for comment on the story and didn’t hear back by the time of publication.

‘Deflecting responsibility’

Security researchers are also not buying LayerZero’s isolated framing, which pinned the blame on Kelp.

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Kelp is a liquid restaking protocol. Its core competency is staking infrastructure, EigenLayer integration, and liquid staking token management. When integrating with LayerZero, Kelp relied on LayerZero’s documentation, their defaults, and their team’s guidance to make configuration decisions, the source claimed.

Yearn Finance core team developer Artem K, who is popularly known as @banteg on X, posted a technical review of LayerZero’s public deployment code and said that the reference setup ships with single-source verification defaults across every major chain, including Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism.

That deployment also leaves a public endpoint exposed that leaks the list of configured servers to anyone who queries it.

Banteg flagged in his analysis that he can’t prove which configuration Kelp used, but noted that LayerZero usually asks new operators to use its default setup, which its post-mortem criticized.

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Chainlink community manager Zach Rynes put it bluntly on X, alleging that LayerZero was “deflecting responsibility” for its own compromised infrastructure and accused the company of throwing Kelp under the bus for trusting a setup LayerZero itself supported.

As such, LayerZero has said it will no longer sign messages for any application running a single-verifier setup, forcing a protocol-wide migration.

Read more: ‘DeFi is dead’: crypto community scrambles after this year’s biggest hack exposes contagion risk

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Strategy boosts BTC stash to 800k with $2.5B for 34,164 BTC

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Crypto Breaking News

Strategy, Michael Saylor’s flagship vehicle and the largest public holder of Bitcoin, has surpassed 800,000 BTC in total holdings after its latest purchases. The company disclosed in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it bought 34,164 BTC for $2.54 billion between April 13 and 19, at an average price of $74,395 per coin.

The new purchase lifts Strategy’s total BTC under custody to 815,061 coins, purchased for $61.56 billion. The firm had about 780,897 BTC after a $1 billion buy just a week earlier. By coin count, the April tranche ranks as Strategy’s third-largest BTC acquisition, behind 55,500 BTC and 51,780 BTC purchases made in November 2024.

Key takeaways

  • New BTC haul: 34,164 BTC acquired for $2.54 billion (April 13–19), at an average price of $74,395 per coin.
  • Funding mix: Stretch (STRC), the perpetual preferred security, supplied about $2.18 billion (roughly 85.7% of the total proceeds); Class A common stock contributed about $366 million.
  • Record-pace activity via STRC ATM: The STRC at-the-market program delivered two consecutive days of heavy buying, with estimated BTC purchases rising to around 17,204 BTC across 11.9 million and 14.4 million shares sold, according to STRC Live—about a 518% surge versus the four-week average.
  • Cost basis and scale: The purchase price sits slightly below Strategy’s overall average cost basis, reinforcing the company’s long-standing commitment to accumulating BTC.
  • Future dividend signal: Strategy CEO Phong Le has signaled potential semi-monthly dividends for STRC, a unique feature among preferreds, a move the company says could be attractive.

Strategy expands its BTC stake with a mid-April buy

The363,164-BTC addition cements Strategy’s position as the world’s most prominent publicly traded Bitcoin holder. The deal, documented in an 8-K filing, shows the bulk of the purchase was executed through financing channels tied to STRC, the company’s perpetual preferred security. With the new BTC, Strategy’s total holdings stand at 815,061 BTC, a stake amassed for $61.56 billion to date.

For context, Strategy had been holding about 780,897 BTC after a $1 billion purchase a week prior, underscoring a rapid acceleration in accumulation over a short window. The new acquisition sits just below Strategy’s average cost of around $75,527 per BTC, illustrating a cautious approach to price levels over the course of the company’s investment program.

In a regulatory filing, Strategy confirmed the April purchases and reiterated that the company prioritizes a diversified approach to funding its Bitcoin stack, balancing debt-like instruments with equity capital. The size and cadence of the buys highlight how a very large corporate treasury can shape a single-asset narrative, particularly as BTC remains a focal point for corporate treasuries seeking to optimize risk/return over time.

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STRC fuels the deal, underscoring the instrument’s role in Strategy’s strategy

The funding structure behind the latest BTC accumulation shows STRC playing a central role. The SEC filing indicates STRC generated $2.18 billion in proceeds from the sale of shares, accounting for roughly 85.7% of the total funding for the new purchase. By contrast, net proceeds from the sale of Class A common stock accounted for about $366 million.

Strategy’s leadership has repeatedly highlighted STRC as a key financing vehicle. Last week, co-founder and executive leadership signaled the potential for STRC to pay semi-monthly dividends, a rarity among preferred securities. In remarks cited by the filing, Strategy CEO Phong Le said, “If we were to move forward with paying STRC semi-monthly, we would be in category one, the only preferred in the world that pays semi-monthly dividends. We think this is unique and attractive.”

ATM program momentum and what it signals

The week’s activity also reflected STRC’s at-the-market program’s capacity to drive large, rapid purchases. STRC Live reported a new daily record on April 13 of about 7,741 BTC tied to the sale of 11.9 million STRC shares, generating more than $1 billion in trading volume. The following day, the program set another record with an estimated 9,364 BTC tied to the sale of 14.4 million shares. Combined, the two days accounted for roughly 17,204 BTC, marking a 518% increase versus the four-week average.

These figures illustrate how a perpetual preferred instrument can work in tandem with a strategic corporate treasury plan to widen exposure to Bitcoin quickly, leveraging market liquidity to scale holdings without committing to large, single-block equity raises.

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Market implications and what investors should watch next

Strategy’s latest round of accumulation reinforces the company’s longstanding thesis: Bitcoin remains a core long-term asset, with corporate treasuries willing to deploy significant capital through diversified financing structures. For investors in Strategy and BTC, the coordination between STRC-based funding and large-scale purchases signals a sustained appetite for exposure to Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset rather than a speculative position.

Key questions moving forward include how STRC dividends will evolve, whether subsequent purchases will follow the same financing pattern, and how regulators might view semi-monthly dividend structures tied to a crypto-asset strategy. Market participants will want to monitor further SEC disclosures and STRC Live updates for new guidance on payout schedules and any shifts in the ATM program’s cadence.

As Strategy continues to expand its BTC stash, eyes will remain on the company’s next steps and the potential ripple effects on corporate treasury behavior, Bitcoin price discovery, and the broader crypto market’s adoption by public-market players.

Readers should watch for additional updates from Strategy and STRC in the coming weeks, including any new 8-K filings or official statements on dividend structure and future ATM activity.

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Risk & affiliate notice: Crypto assets are volatile and capital is at risk. This article may contain affiliate links. Read full disclosure

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Saylor’s Strategy Boosts Bitcoin Holdings Past 815,000 BTC

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Saylor’s Strategy Boosts Bitcoin Holdings Past 815,000 BTC

Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the world’s largest public Bitcoin holder, has blasted past 800,000 BTC in total holdings after announcing its latest purchases.

Strategy acquired 34,164 Bitcoin (BTC) for $2.54 billion between April 13 and 19, according to an 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

The buy ranks as Strategy’s third-largest Bitcoin acquisition on record by coin count, behind purchases of 55,500 BTC and 51,780 BTC in November 2024.

Holding around 780,897 BTC after a $1 billion purchase just a week ago, the company now holds 815,061 BTC, purchased for $61.56 billion.

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Source: SEC

The new acquisition was made at an average price of $74,395 per coin, slightly below the company’s average acquisition price of $75,527.

Saylor had teased the purchase on Sunday, signaling another large Bitcoin acquisition ahead of the announcement. The company also disclosed on Friday plans to pay Stretch (STRC) dividends twice monthly. STRC is the company’s perpetual preferred security.

“If we were to move forward with paying STRC semi-monthly, we would be in category one, the only preferred in the world that pays semi-monthly dividends. We think this is unique and attractive,” Strategy CEO Phong Le said.

Related: Bitmine ramps up Ether buys, pushes holdings toward 5% of total supply

Strategy’s STRC funds more than 85% of the purchase

Similar to a few recent acquisitions, the majority of Strategy’s latest purchase has been funded through STRC.

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According to the filing, STRC generated $2.18 billion, or about 85.7% of total proceeds, while sales of Class A common stock (MSTR) contributed $366 million.

Source: SEC

Last week marked several new records for STRC, including the company’s largest single-day buying spree through its at-the-market, or ATM, program.

On April 13, STRC set a new estimated daily record of about 7,741 BTC, based on the sale of 11.9 million shares through its at-the-market, or ATM, program, generating more than $1 billion in trading volume, according to STRC Live.

The stock set another record the following day, with an estimated 9,364 BTC tied to 14.4 million shares sold through its at-the-market, or ATM, program. The two days combined brought an estimated 17,204 BTC, marking a 518% surge versus the four-week average.

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