Hopes for a turnaround rest on agentic wallets capable of automated buying and selling
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US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global posted a loss of $666.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, down from a profit of $1.29 billion a year earlier. This was the first quarterly loss since the third quarter of 2023 and significantly worse than analysts’ expectations.
The weak figures were mainly due to a sharp slowdown in cryptocurrency trading volume, amid a broad selling wave in digital-asset markets. During the last three months of 2025, the prices of many crypto currencies fell sharply, making investors more reluctant to trade.
Trades revenue fell during the last three months of 2025.
Transaction revenue fell from about $1.56 billion last year to about $982.7 million in the recent quarter.
At the same time, there was an increase in subscriptions and services revenue (up 13.5%), which came to about $727.4 million. thanks in part to growth in stablecoin business.
Coinbase described the crypto market as cyclical and that market conditions are temporarily less favourable.
The crypto market has not been doing well for some time. Investors seem to have lost faith in Bitcoin in particular. There is a chance that Bitcoin will move towards $60,000 again in the coming period.
The downward price trend is chopping up quite a bit. Crypto exchange Gemini, founded by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has announced that it will lay off up to 200 employees – about a quarter of its workforce – and that it will cease operations in the UK, the European Union and Australia.
According to the brothers, these foreign markets have been difficult to conquer and organisational complexity led to higher costs and slower decision-making.
Despite the difficult market conditions, Coinbase has unveiled a new type of crypto wallets designed specifically for AI programs (AI agents). With these wallets, autonomous software agents can now hold, issue, earn and trade cryptocurrencies themselves without the need for human intervention each time.
The so-called ‘agentic wallets’ are built to conduct transactions directly on the blockchain. They use the Coinbase-developed x402 protocol, which is designed to allow machines to exchange value without human approval and has already processed tens of millions of transactions, according to Coinbase.
While traditional wallets are mainly designed to allow machines to exchange value without the need for human approval, they are also designed to be able to trade directly on the blockchain without the need for human intervention.
These wallets are built to make transactions directly on the blockchain without the need for human intervention.
Where traditional wallets are mainly used by humans through apps to manually send or trade crypto, these AI wallets can operate completely autonomously within preset limits. Developers can set what an AI agent can and cannot do – for example, automatically rebalance a wallet, manage liquidity or automatically pay for services and APIs.
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