Crypto's New Frontend: AI Chat Windows Take On Wallets, Apps

Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 Base and Liquid, a multi-asset trading platform backed by Paradigm and General Catalyst, both rolled out products on 26 May that bring trading and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity into ChatGPT and Claude. 

Base's new tool, Base MCP, hooks user accounts into AI clients via the Model Context Protocol, a standard that enables AI software to communicate with external services. It went live with four protocols on Base: token-swap venue Uniswap, lending markets Morpho and Moonwell, and perpetuals exchange Avantis. 

Liquid's app, Co-Invest, spans more than 500 markets across crypto, stocks, foreign exchange and bets on prediction-market site Polymarket, with orders sent to perpetuals platform Hyperliquid, order-book venue Lighter and synthetic-asset platform Ostium. 

Two layers, one day

Base pitched its tool as a bet on agent-driven interfaces. "Over time, we believe agentic chat interfaces will become an important surface for app discovery and distribution," the company wrote in a blog post. Customers can move funds, swap tokens, view balances and tap DeFi protocols with plain-language prompts, skipping the usual mix of wallets and dashboards.

Liquid is going wider. Co-Invest handles account funding, position analysis and order placement inside the chat, with pre-IPO secondaries and Polymarket bets thrown in. Co-founder and CEO Franklyn Wang, a former Two Sigma quant researcher, said in a blog post that the app "marks a shift from human-limited capital allocation to intelligence-augmented capital allocation." The firm has handled more than $3bn in volume across about 40,000 users since going live in August 2025.

A months-long pipeline

The twin debuts cap a months-long build-out of AI-crypto infrastructure by Visa, Stripe-backed Tempo, MoonPay and Amazon Web Services.

Visa rolled out a programmatic AI payments tool in March, the same month Stripe-backed Tempo introduced a protocol for machine-driven transactions. MoonPay published an open-source wallet standard that lets AI agents hold funds and sign transactions with built-in spending limits.

Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services integrated Coinbase's x402 payments protocol into its Bedrock AgentCore platform, allowing AI agents to pay in USD Coin (USDC) for compute and inference services. A batch-settlement upgrade now allows payments as low as $0.0001.

Regulatory cover

The regulatory ground beneath these products is still forming. Liquid runs non-custodially and never holds client funds. That structure may qualify the firm for the carve-outs that US agencies have started extending to crypto interfaces. 

The CFTC's Market Participants Division issued Staff Letter 26-09 to non-custodial wallet maker Phantom on 17 March, granting it no-action relief from broker-registration requirements. The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets followed on 13 April with a staff statement granting relief to "Covered User Interface Providers." Whether AI-routed trading fits inside those carve-outs remains untested.

Chat as choke point

Still, the direction of travel is clear. The two debuts put trading inside chat windows whose user base starts at ChatGPT's roughly 900mn active users a week, according to OpenAI's February figure, and extends across Claude and rival assistants. Exchanges and wallet providers face a decision on whether and how to join.