AI agents are moving from chat and workflow automation into purchasing, subscriptions, API calls, compute, data, and financial actions.
Investor overview
Commerce infrastructure for the autonomous buyer economy
Cortex is building the trust and transaction layer agents need to buy from merchants: discovery, payment policy, quote commitments, receipts, disputes, reputation signals, and machine-readable settlement data on Base.
Investment thesis
Agents need commerce infrastructure, not just wallets.
Network wedge
Base
Payment scope
Transfers, swaps, x402
Protocol fee today
0 bps, instrumented
First buyer
Developers building agent commerce
Traction
Live on Base Sepolia today
Pulled live from the Cortex hosted API. Early testnet activity — small numbers, real data. Click into any row on the protocol dashboard for the full receipt + merchant detail.
Live network
Base Sepolia
Active merchants
0
Active services
0
Receipts settled
0
Settled volume
0
Protocol fees
0 (0 bps today)
Want to feel it end-to-end? 10-minute Buy from Cortex walkthrough — register a merchant, set an agent policy, commit a quote, pay, record receipt + fulfillment. Or read the runnable scripts at ops/sdk-examples/.
Market
Autonomous buying creates a new merchant problem
Merchants need a way to accept autonomous buyers without treating every agent like an anonymous bot or unmanaged wallet.
Payment rails like wallets, stablecoins, swaps, and x402 are improving, but commerce still needs discovery, policy, receipts, dispute signals, and reputation.
Product
Cortex makes agent transactions verifiable
Merchant registry
Onchain merchant, payout, service, facilitator, metadata, and capability records.
Quote commitments
Canonical payment terms that bind merchant, service, agent, token, rail, amount, nonce, resource, terms, and fee fields.
Policy layer
Delegated budgets for transfers, swaps, facilitator-mediated payments, and x402 authorizations.
Receipts and disputes
Settlement records, result hashes, refund/dispute signals, and reputation inputs.
Analytics surface
Indexed protocol metrics for merchants, agents, facilitators, services, volume, fees, and disputes.
Agent interfaces
REST API, MCP tools, dashboard, SDK, and testnet runbooks.
Why now
Payments are improving faster than commerce trust
Wallets and x402 can move value. Cortex focuses on the surrounding trust system: who is selling, what service was promised, what the agent was allowed to spend, what payment terms were accepted, what was delivered, and what happened when a transaction failed.
Payment
Policy-aware commerce
Directory listing
Verifiable merchant and service state
API response
Receipt, result hash, and dispute trail
Generic wallet
Delegated agent budget and replay protection
Ecosystem fit
How Cortex composes with the Base + Coinbase stack
Cortex is built to plug into the standards the Base ecosystem is already pushing — not to replace them. Each integration is graded on what's shipped today vs. what's queued.
Base Sepolia → Base mainnet
DeployedAll eight Cortex contracts are live on Base Sepolia today. Mainnet deployment follows once testnet activity validates the merchant + agent demand side.
x402 payment standard
Shipped (normalizer)The hosted API canonicalizes x402 payment requirements into a quote-bound envelope and computes the hash agents compare before signing. Scheme-specific verification for EIP-3009 and Permit2 is next.
Coinbase Smart Wallet
Compatible todayThe Cortex web app connects via wagmi v2 + RainbowKit, with the Coinbase Wallet connector pre-wired. Smart-wallet users sign merchant registration, agent policy, and quote commits directly from their Coinbase account — Cortex's own PolicyAccount is optional, not required. See the architecture doc's Wallet options section.
Coinbase AgentKit
RoadmapThe Cortex MCP server already exposes the tools an agent runtime needs (merchant lookup, intent listing, transaction preflight). A reference AgentKit buyer that uses these tools end-to-end is queued for the next sprint.
Business model
Monetization starts with infrastructure, not a tax
Hosted protocol API
Managed indexing, APIs, dashboards, alerts, and developer tooling for teams building agent commerce.
Merchant verification
Verified merchant/service profiles, richer discovery placement, and trust/reporting tools.
Facilitator routing
Commercial relationships around payment facilitation, settlement reliability, and payment acceptance.
Protocol fees later
Fee fields are instrumented today at 0 bps, giving a clean future path once usage and trust exist.
Roadmap
Protocol first, chain optional
Now
Local stack, commerce contracts, indexed analytics, dashboard, docs, and Base Sepolia deployment path.
Next
Base Sepolia public demo, merchant catalog publishing, x402 normalizer, hosted dashboard, and early merchant/API-provider pilots.
Then
Reputation scoring, privacy controls, dispute workflow UX, facilitator integrations, and production deployment on Base.
Option
If activity warrants it, evolve selected primitives into predeploys or chain-native modules.
The ask
Turn the Base Sepolia demo into a pilot-ready commerce network
The next milestone is a public testnet run with hosted dashboard, merchant catalog publishing, x402 normalization, direct transfer and swap examples, and a small set of merchant/API-provider pilots that prove agents can safely buy useful services.