Autonomous agents are becoming Base-native
AI agents are increasingly transacting, coordinating, and holding assets directly onchain. We map the protocols enabling this shift.
Over the past several months, Base has become a focal point for a category of application that didn't meaningfully exist a few years ago: AI agents that hold wallets, execute transactions, and coordinate with other agents directly onchain.
The appeal of building agent infrastructure on Base is straightforward. Low transaction costs make it economically viable for agents to transact frequently — something that would be prohibitively expensive on networks with higher fees. Combined with fast finality and a growing set of account abstraction tools, Base provides an environment where autonomous, transacting software can operate at a cost structure that makes sense.
We're seeing this play out across several distinct categories. The first is autonomous trading and market-making agents — software that manages onchain positions, rebalances portfolios, or provides liquidity based on programmatic strategies. These agents benefit directly from low gas costs, since profitable strategies often depend on the ability to execute many small transactions.
The second category is agent-to-agent commerce: protocols that allow AI agents to pay each other for services, data, or compute. This is a genuinely new primitive — markets where the buyers and sellers are both autonomous software systems, transacting based on programmatic logic rather than direct human input.
A third, earlier-stage category involves agents that manage real-world tasks with onchain settlement — for example, agents that coordinate logistics, content creation, or data labeling, with payment and verification happening onchain. This category is less mature than the first two, but the infrastructure being built to support agent identity and reputation suggests it's an area to watch.
Identity and reputation infrastructure is, in fact, one of the most important under-the-radar developments in this space. As more agents begin transacting autonomously, the ability to verify which agent is which — and to build a persistent reputation for an agent across interactions — becomes critical. Several teams on Base are building exactly this kind of infrastructure, treating agent identity as a primitive in its own right rather than an afterthought.
What makes this trend particularly relevant to Base specifically is the combination of cost structure, developer tooling, and a community that has been unusually receptive to experimenting with agent-based applications. Whether this receptiveness compounds into a durable advantage will depend on whether the infrastructure being built now — identity, payments, coordination — proves robust as agent activity scales.
Kaelor is tracking this category closely and will continue to surface the protocols building foundational agent infrastructure, as distinct from applications built on top of it.