// GLOSSARY -- WEB3 INFRASTRUCTURE

What is the Coinbase Developer Platform?

1 min read Updated

CDP is Coinbase's infrastructure for building onchain applications — providing wallet APIs, smart contract tools, and the x402 payment protocol. It's the primary infrastructure for agent payment development.

WHY IT MATTERS

CDP provides the building blocks for onchain agent operations: wallet creation and management, transaction construction and signing, smart contract deployment, and the x402 payment facilitation layer.

For agentic finance, CDP is significant because it provides production-grade wallet infrastructure purpose-built for programmatic access — exactly what AI agents need.

CDP's AgentKit provides turnkey integration for popular agent frameworks, making it straightforward to give agents onchain capabilities with built-in safety features.

HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS

PolicyLayer adds spending controls on top of CDP-built agents. While CDP provides the wallet and payment infrastructure, PolicyLayer provides the policy enforcement layer that governs how agents use that infrastructure.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Is CDP free?
CDP has free tiers for development and testing. Production usage has pay-as-you-go pricing based on API calls and transactions.
Do I need CDP for PolicyLayer?
No. PolicyLayer works with any wallet infrastructure. But CDP is a common and well-integrated choice for agent wallet management.
What's AgentKit?
CDP's framework-specific integrations for LangChain, OpenAI, and other agent frameworks. It provides pre-built tools for onchain operations.

FURTHER READING

Enforce policies on every tool call

Intercept is the open-source MCP proxy that enforces YAML policies on AI agent tool calls. No code changes needed.

npx -y @policylayer/intercept
github.com/policylayer/intercept →
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