AI Agents as Biggest Power User, Gemini Launches Passkey Wallet, Offchain Labs Acquires ZeroDev, NEAR Partners with IQ AI

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Ethereum Foundation Highlights AI Agents as Future “Biggest Power User”

The Ethereum Foundation, via Coinbase developers Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr, announced that autonomous AI agents are poised to become Ethereum’s “biggest power user.” This projection stems from leveraging the long-overlooked HTTP 402 “Payment Required” standard, revived through EIP‑3009 and implemented in Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol, to enable AI agents to authorize stablecoin transfers autonomously.

In practice, these AI agents can operate like vending machines: upon receiving an HTTP 402 request, they sign a transaction, pay, and receive a response without human involvement.

This innovation unlocks transformative use-cases, including self-driving taxis covering their own operational costs, AI-generated content billed via stablecoin payments, and services with API calls paying for computation or storage autonomously.

Early experiments are already underway: Hyperbolic Labs integrated HTTP 402 into a large language model, while Prodia Labs uses it to power media generation. These prototypes demonstrate how x402 enables AI agents to orchestrate “full economic loops” seamlessly — that is, autonomously chaining services and payments in a composable fashion.

This development marks Ethereum’s potential evolution into a transactional infrastructure where AI systems act as independent economic actors — expanding its utility far beyond manual human interaction.

Gemini Launches Self-Custody Wallet with Passkey Onboarding

The Gemini team announced the launch of the Gemini Wallet, a self‑custody smart wallet offering both embedded and portable flexibility for both crypto users and developers.

Complementing this is the Gemini Onchain™ Dashboard, a transparent, user‑friendly interface for trading, exploring Web3, and earning onchain returns.

Key features include instantly accessible wallets via passkeys, eliminating the need for downloads or recovery phrases, plus a built‑in dashboard that enables trading of off‑platform tokens, dApp discovery, and yield investments.

To lower entry barriers, Gemini is sponsoring gas fees for initial key actions and offering a free ENS subdomain (like yourname.gemini.eth), supported by Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, and Base. Later this year, the wallet will also support seamless trading integration with existing Gemini exchange accounts.

Gemini frames this launch as a solution to crypto’s longstanding onboarding challenges. By tapping into the ubiquity of passkeys, already integrated across mobile and desktop platforms, the wallet aims to demystify self‑custody and make it frictionless for future users.

Offchain Labs Acquires ZeroDev to Boost Smart Account Tools

Offchain Labs, the firm behind Arbitrum, announced the acquisition of ZeroDev, a leading provider of smart account infrastructure aimed at advancing on-chain consumer applications and developer tooling.

This strategic move marks Offchain Labs’ evolution from a primarily chain-level infrastructure provider into a full-stack platform supporting both developer and consumer-facing layers.

ZeroDev’s infrastructure currently powers over 5 million smart accounts across more than 30 EVM-compatible blockchains, serving notable projects such as ApeChain, Infinex, Conduit, Crossmint, DeFi.app, DIMO, and Rodeo. These tools deliver advanced capabilities such as gas abstraction, programmable security, and automated transactions, all designed to streamline user experience and application development.

Steven Goldfeder, CEO of Offchain Labs, described the acquisition as “a very logical next iteration” of the company’s broader mission to solve the real-world impediments holding back mass adoption of blockchain technology. He emphasized that Offchain Labs is now extending its reach upwards from layer 2 to the smart contract layer, aiming to create seamless interoperability across the stack.

ZeroDev’s five-member team will integrate into Offchain Labs and continue advancing its developer infrastructure, a key step toward offering cohesive, full-stack tooling for building user-friendly on-chain applications.

While financial details were not disclosed, the acquisition reflects a broader push to unify scalable blockchain infrastructure with user-centric smart account features.

NEAR and IQ AI Launch Cross-Chain Tokenized AI Agents

The NEAR Foundation announced a partnership with IQ AI to expand the ecosystem of tokenized AI agents, enabling them to operate autonomously across multiple blockchain networks.

Central to this collaboration is IQ AI’s Agent Tokenization Platform (ATP), which empowers developers to build AI agents able to manage assets, execute financial strategies, and engage with decentralized economies on their own. IQ AI has integrated NEAR Intents into its Agent Development Kit (ADK), accompanied by specialized Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, providing a secure, standardized, two-way interface to the NEAR blockchain.

With NEAR Intents embedded in the ADK, these tokenized agents can autonomously trade, stake, and perform cross-chain interactions, all without manual or centralized coordination.

This breakthrough paves the way for decentralized, autonomous AI agents to conduct complex financial operations across diverse networks, reducing reliance on human oversight and centralized systems, and bolstering the scalability and interoperability of AI-driven DeFi activities on NEAR’s platform.

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