𝘈𝘳𝘮𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨’𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘣𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘴 𝘢 $15,000 𝘣𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently launched an artificial intelligence accelerator grant program to award $3,000 to five projects focused on combining AI with crypto wallets.
According to Coinbase CEO Brad Armstrong, large language models (LLMs) — the technology behind AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude — could accomplish finance-related tasks if properly equipped.
“LLMs should have crypto wallets. Let’s help AI agents get work done (on your behalf) and participate in the economy.”
Economically empowered AI
Coinbase engineering lead Yuga Cohler posted a demo of the “AI Wallets” feature to X on Aug. 12. In the demo, Cohler demonstrates a scenario where an organization is paying people to participate in human-feedback sessions to train an image recognition model.
The system prompts Cohler to choose the image he “thinks is best” from three pictures. Once he makes his selection and thus fulfills his task of helping train the AI, the model can send his payment directly to his cryptocurrency wallet.
This scenario evokes a bit of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk wherein humans are paid for completing simple tasks online. However, there are a number of conceivable use cases for giving an AI system the ability to conduct and receive wallet transactions.
Developer incentives
The Coinbase Developer Platform announced its $15,000 accelerator grant program to explore those use cases. According to the Coinbase website, the company is looking for a useful “bot” built using an LLM that can connect to Coinbase’s multiparty computation wallets.
Per Coinbase, the grant is designed to test the waters of AI-induced economic applications:
“A major barrier to building useful applications with AI is that AI agents can’t get a bank account to send/receive automated payments. Building onchain fixes this.”
Those interested in applying for the grants have until Sep. 5 to submit their applications.
