Coinbase's L2 quietly became the default home for on-chain dollars. That makes it the natural meeting point for paying agents.
Dollars live here
Base has deep USDC liquidity and a large builder community. Where the money and the developers gather, agents follow.
You do not start a market. You go to where one already is.
Cheap enough for micro-payments
Fees on Base are low enough that a fraction-of-a-cent payment makes sense. That is the unit agents trade in: small, frequent, automatic.
A rail that makes tiny payments uneconomic is no rail for agents at all.
x402's reference rail
The x402 payment standard grew up on Base. Paying per request, in USDC, with no account and no API key, works here today, not in theory.
That maturity is why we treat Base as the proving ground for the pay side.
ERC-8004 native
Agent identity is an Ethereum standard, and Base speaks Ethereum. The same passport works with no translation layer.
Identity on one EVM chain is identity on all of them.