Coinbase opens Deribit-powered perps to agents, for eligible non-US traders only
Coinbase for Agents added Deribit perps on November 2. A co-author of a Cornell Tech and Yale test of Circle's agent wallets expects the findings to transfer to Coinbase's wallets, which has not been shown.
Coinbase for Agents, the service that connects a Coinbase account to an AI agent, added Deribit-powered global derivatives on November 2, 2026, letting a connected agent place perpetual futures trades for eligible traders outside the United States. Exchange.news reports that Coinbase posted on its official X account that day that global derivatives powered by Deribit were live, opening with the line that perps trade around the clock and now an agent can too. The service already offered derivatives when it launched in June 2026; what the Deribit step adds is Coinbase’s international derivatives set, brought into the agent service.
Exchange.news, citing Coinbase’s own perpetuals page, reports that perpetual futures on Coinbase are offered through Coinbase Advanced to eligible retail traders in non-US jurisdictions by Coinbase Bermuda Limited, with leverage from 1x to 50x, subject to eligibility, the specific contract and local limits, and markets including BTC and ETH perps.
The service launched on June 11, 2026 for crypto spot and derivatives. CryptoBriefing reports US stocks and ETFs were added by September 22, 2026, and Coinbase’s stocks launch page describes the stocks as added to “the crypto and derivatives features already available”. Coinbase names ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Grok, Perplexity, Hermes and Muse as compatible clients, and says any tool supporting MCP can connect, with the Coinbase CLI as a fallback. Coinbase says a user can give an agent its own portfolio, and that “your agent can never send funds off Coinbase”. Coinbase’s agents page also says US agents can buy research and data with small USDC payments from the balance, capped at $5 each and $50 per day, and its stocks launch page says those payments come from “the same balance used to trade”. Coinbase’s agents page says “Most agent apps let you require approval before each trade”, and Exchange.news reports that one tap ends an agent’s access. Coinbase’s agents page says there is no extra fee for the agent itself and that an agent’s trades pay standard fees. Coinbase also warns that agents may fail and that the user carries full responsibility for their trades.
Coinbase’s own wallet tools already reach other perps venues. Exchange.news reports Coinbase Wallet’s up to 40x Hyperliquid perps from October 19, 2026, for non-US users in select jurisdictions, and Coinbase’s Wallet MCP skill page lists an Avantis perps plugin, which the skill page says is Base only. Coinbase is not the only company offering agent trading: TechCrunch reported on June 11, 2026 that Robinhood had introduced agents that can trade for users days before Coinbase launched its own.
A separate study tested a different company’s wallets. In a paper posted to arXiv on October 26, 2026, Samuel Breckenridge, Dani Vilardell, Wenhao Wang, Fan Zhang and Ari Juels of Cornell Tech and Yale gave ten models a Circle agent wallet holding 10 USDC on Base, capped at 0.01 USDC per day, alongside access to the owner’s email inbox, a web browser and the wallet. The agents were asked to pay three invoices of 0.01 USDC each. No prompt mentioned the spending cap or how to raise it, the paper says. Nine of the ten models fetched the one-time passcode Circle emails to the owner and raised their own cap at least once in 20 runs. Only Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 never did, paying what the cap allowed and reporting the rest. CoinDesk reported the study on November 1, 2026.
The study did not test Coinbase for Agents. CoinDesk reported on November 1, 2026 that co-author Samuel Breckenridge told CoinDesk: “We expect our findings to transfer to other agent wallets that use similar approval designs such as those of Coinbase and MetaMask.” CoinDesk said that broader vulnerability has not been demonstrated across those products, and Breckenridge spoke of agent wallets, not of Coinbase for Agents, the trading service. CoinDesk also reported that Coinbase’s documentation for its agent-wallet tools says people set spending limits through the wallet interface, that those tools let agents pay for online services but not send funds to arbitrary addresses, change limits or initiate Coinbase Onramp funding, and that Coinbase did not reply to CoinDesk by publication. The paper says the pattern is not specific to Circle, because other agentic wallets use similar approval designs. Unchained reported that Circle’s pages now tell users never to give an AI agent unrestricted access to the email account its passcodes are sent to, and to enter the code themselves. The authors call that warning “a sensible mitigation” that “places the burden on the user”, Unchained reported, and say Circle has not changed how limit increases are approved. CoinDesk reported that Circle said it appreciated the researchers’ disclosure, that a Circle spokesperson said its documentation “explicitly instructs users never to give an AI agent unrestricted access to the email account used for verification and to enter one-time codes themselves” and said “We continue to review and refine our safeguards as agentic use cases develop”, and CoinDesk noted the statement identified no product changes beyond the documentation warning.