Renowned economist Alex Tabbarok described cryptocurrencies as "money" for artificial intelligence following Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's announcement of x402 integration into Google's Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2). This enables AI agents to transact using USDC stablecoins for automated payments like data crawls and microtasks without manual intervention. Coinbase shares dipped 0.39% in pre-market trading after closing at $327.91.