Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted: Most companies would move faster if internal platforms had to win internal customers just like external ones. Publicly disclose uptime, delays, and costs, and openly share functional requirements; real products can charge internal teams. Agents make this feasible—they will discover services, compare services, and bypass the poor ones.

This is not the first version of a new slogan. In 2022, he wrote on the company blog about declining efficiency after scaling: coordination headwinds, veto politics, waning risk appetite, and teams looking inward. Remedies include direct accountability, small pods of no more than ten people, product owners looking at profit and loss and operating like independent companies, and all product and engineering teams releasing APIs to allow other teams to self-serve without meetings. At that time, there was already a call to productize internal capabilities.

In 2026, he applied the same logic to agents. In a company-wide letter announcing layoffs of about 14%, he wrote: using AI to complete in days what previously took a team weeks, non-technical teams are also delivering production code, and the organization is compressed to a maximum of five layers below the CEO or COO, eliminating pure managerial roles, with pods revolving around managing a team of agents. The internal agent framework is named Toshi, which connects with external vendors, allows payment via agent financial agreements, and modifies the "brain" in pull requests to enable corrective feedback. He mentioned that there are about 1,200 full-time agents working in the company, and future discussions will converge on a general agent, which will then coordinate a large number of sub-agents.

Charging is a key step. If the internal platform relies solely on administrative designation, poor services will not lose customers; once delays, costs, and availability are made transparent, agents will route based on metrics, and poor platforms will lose internal budgets. External products already operate within these numbers; internal products have long survived on tickets and meetings. Armstrong has written the concept of "like an independent company" from human organizational design into a machine-executable service catalog.

The Base chain is cited as an example of protective incubation rather than being stifled by headquarters: if new internal businesses are nurtured as platforms, they will be embraced to death; only when treated as products can they attract external customers. Stablecoin revenue was once a project he voted against, but the team insisted on it, later contributing hundreds of millions of dollars. Charging for internal platforms brings this external validation inside the company firewall in advance.

In market mechanisms, buyers seek product pods and agent schedulers with normal uptime and unit prices, while sellers are shared platforms for identity, payments, data, cloud, and risk control. Event-driven processes allow agents to automatically compare prices and find alternative routes. Funding is reclassified from cost center budgets to internal revenue, with poor services being drained first by routing. Beneficiaries are platform groups that can clearly define service catalogs and withstand SLA comparisons; those under pressure are shared teams that survive on meetings and mandatory access, as well as business lines that treat "internal free" as a right. The speed of external operations is being replicated internally, and company boundaries are beginning to resemble a market.

Source: Public Information