Coinbase Developer Platform

Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) is Coinbase's suite of APIs, SDKs, and developer tools for building production-grade onchain applications. Rather than requiring teams to stitch together separate providers for wallets, payments, data indexing, and AI agent tooling, CDP packages all of these into a single developer interface backed by Coinbase's institutional compliance and security infrastructure. Both EVM chains (including Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism) and Solana are supported across the core product tiers.

Core Products

Wallets

CDP offers two distinct wallet modes suited to different application architectures.

Embedded Wallets are non-custodial wallets designed to be surfaced inside consumer-facing products. Users authenticate via email, one-time passcode, or OAuth (social logins), and CDP automatically generates a wallet tied to that session without requiring users to handle private keys directly. Embedded Wallets support all major EVM chains alongside Solana mainnet and devnet. Built-in capabilities include staking, onramp and offramp integrations, balances, token swaps, and NFT operations. The product reached general availability in 2025.

Server Wallets are custodial wallets intended for backend applications and automated systems. Developers create and manage Solana or EVM addresses programmatically via API, with CDP handling private key storage. Server Wallets include policy controls for per-transaction limits and session caps, making them suited to treasury management, client fund segregation, and high-frequency automation.

The cdp-sdk — available in TypeScript, Python, Go, and Rust — wraps both wallet types, letting teams manage EVM and Solana wallets with CDP securing private keys. A dedicated @coinbase/cdp-solana-standard-wallet package provides Solana Wallet Standard compliance for front-end applications.

AgentKit

AgentKit is CDP's toolkit for giving AI agents a crypto wallet and the ability to execute onchain actions autonomously. It is framework-agnostic and wallet-agnostic: developers can integrate it with OpenAI's Agents SDK, LangChain, or other AI orchestration frameworks, and pair it with any CDP wallet type. Agents built with AgentKit can deploy tokens, execute transfers, perform token swaps, interact with smart contracts, mint NFTs, access price feeds via Pyth, and supply assets to DeFi protocols like Morpho. USDC balances held in agentic wallets are eligible for yield.

AgentKit ships with an action-provider architecture — pluggable skill modules that extend what an agent can do onchain. CDP also released a CLI tool and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server interface so agents can interact with the platform through standard AI tool-calling patterns. As of mid-2026, AgentKit supports Coinbase-for-Agents, enabling AI agents to trade through Coinbase's trading infrastructure.

x402 Protocol

x402 is CDP's stateless payment protocol for AI agents. It uses the HTTP 402 status code to authorize per-request stablecoin payments without requiring session state. This architecture is intended to solve a coordination bottleneck that session-based payment protocols face at scale: payment authorization is bounded to a single request rather than a connection lifetime. x402 powers the CDP SQL API's pay-per-query model and is positioned as an open standard for AI-native commerce.

SQL API and Onchain Data

The CDP SQL API lets developers query indexed blockchain data directly using SQL — no custom indexer, no data warehouse, and no bespoke decode pipeline. Queries run against a ClickHouse-based dialect (CoinbaseQL) and target tables covering transactions, events, decoded logs, blocks, and transfers. The API is priced at $0.10 per query payable in USDC via x402. Originally launched for Base, the SQL API expanded to Solana in August 2026, allowing Solana builders to query onchain data with the same tooling Base developers already use. The API is also available as an MCP skill, enabling AI agents to retrieve onchain data directly within agent workflows.

Additional APIs

The platform includes a Trade API for programmatic token swaps, a Staking API accessible through both embedded wallets and direct API calls, and a Paymaster service that sponsors gas fees to enable gasless transactions on Base. Deposit destinations and programmatic transfer APIs round out the payments layer.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

CDP joined the Solana Developer Platform (SDP) as an infrastructure provider, bringing enterprise and institutional-grade tooling to Solana. Within SDP, CDP Server Wallets give institutions a way to create and manage Solana addresses programmatically with structured account segregation across client, treasury, and operational accounts, with server-side signing and policy-driven transaction controls.

Beyond institutional custody, CDP's Solana support spans embedded wallets for consumer apps, the cdp-sdk for programmatic wallet management, Solana Wallet Standard compliance via the npm package, and SQL-based querying of Solana onchain data. This positions CDP as a broad-spectrum infrastructure provider for Solana rather than a single-purpose tool.

Security and Compliance

CDP operates under Coinbase's enterprise compliance posture, which includes SOC 2 certification and adherence to US regulatory requirements. Private keys managed by CDP are handled through institutional-grade key management infrastructure. Server Wallets expose policy controls that allow builders to enforce transaction limits and session restrictions at the account level. Coinbase's regulatory standing as a public company with SEC oversight underpins CDP's positioning for institutional and regulated financial use cases.

Background

Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam and is listed on NASDAQ (ticker: COIN). It is one of the largest US-regulated cryptocurrency exchanges by volume and the operator of Base, an Ethereum L2. The Coinbase Developer Platform consolidates the company's developer-facing API products under a single brand, reflecting a strategic push to capture infrastructure revenue beyond retail trading. The CDP brand and unified product surface emerged through consolidation of earlier API products in the 2023-2024 period, with Solana support expanding materially through 2025 and 2026.