SpaceX’s (SPCX) Grok got a real-world data point on Friday, September 25, from Coinbase (COIN): CEO Brian Armstrong said it leads the AI agents trading there.
Coinbase opened its platform to agents with Coinbase for Agents on June 11, and on September 22 it added US stocks and ETFs to the crypto spot and futures agents could already trade. On Coinbase, at least, one model already leads.
Grok takes nearly 60% of Coinbase’s agentic trading
“Grok is the leading client for agentic traders on Coinbase currently,” Armstrong wrote on X. He was replying to Coinbase’s developer account, @CoinbaseDev, which put Grok at 59.54% of the measured activity on Coinbase for Agents, against 21.73% for custom command-line setups, 13.37% for Anthropic’s Claude, 3.48% for Perplexity and 1.54% for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. (Bitcoin.com reports that the split covers September 14 to 21, so it’s a one-week snapshot.)
That fits Elon Musk’s pitch that a fast, cheap model wins everyday work, though Coinbase didn’t say why traders picked it.
What new products have done for Coinbase
Futures, prediction markets and equities haven’t broken Coinbase’s link to the crypto cycle.
Revenue fell from $7.35 billion in 2021 to $2.93 billion in 2023, then recovered to $6.88 billion in 2025. That’s 9% growth on 2024, and still 6% below the 2021 peak. New products haven’t lifted the top line past the last bull market, and agent trading is the newest, smallest channel.
Grok’s benchmark cost edge holds, by less than the price list says
Musk wrote on September 21 that Grok is “significantly faster & lower cost” and “a great choice for your everyday workhorse.” Artificial Analysis lists Grok 4.7 at $2/$6 per million input/output tokens, but found it uses about 81k output tokens per Intelligence Index task, against 27k for OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.
At Astra’s listed $50 per million output tokens, that’s about $0.49 of output per task for Grok against $1.35 for Astra. On output tokens alone, Grok is about 64% cheaper, but an 8x gap in output-token pricing shrinks to under 3x once output-token use counts.
A leading share of a niche
Coinbase discloses shares, not dollar volume. Its closest hard figure on the scale of agent activity is for x402, the agent payment protocol it built: “$54M+ in volume” in just over a year, per Coinbase. That’s payment volume rather than Coinbase revenue, but it shows how small the disclosed agent economy remains against Coinbase’s $6.88 billion annual revenue base.
SpaceX looks the same. Deutsche Bank puts Grok, X and other smaller lines at about $3.2 billion of an annualized run rate of at least $100 billion by December, per Moneywise.
Analysts see SpaceX revenue rising from $44.82 billion in 2026 to $188.84 billion in 2028, built on neocloud and Starlink, not Grok.
What COIN stock already prices in
Armstrong’s bigger bet is that as agents multiply, “Crypto and stablecoins will be their go-to payment rail,” as he wrote the same day, replying to a @CoinbasePredict headline that BlackRock sees agents as a major source of stablecoin demand. That would feed the USDC income Coinbase shares with issuer Circle (CRCL).
The market is already paying for it. COIN trades at 29.48x forward EBITDA, up from 17.43x at the end of 2025 and about 29% above its three-year mean of 22.83x. Grok won the first leaderboard. Coinbase still has to show agent volume in its own numbers to earn that multiple.
Want to see whether Coinbase’s premium holds up? Pull COIN’s revenue history, its forward EV/EBITDA range and SpaceX’s revenue estimates on TIKR for free, and check the numbers yourself. Learn more here.
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