Senior Strategic Program Lead · Coinbase · 2025
MCP Payment Spec
Authored the first Model Context Protocol payment spec at Coinbase — now live in production, driving 1,600+ automated resolutions a month and standing as foundational infrastructure for payments AI.
Context
Coinbase Payments, Base App, and CDP needed a standard way for AI agents to reason about and act on payment context — and no such spec existed inside the company. Every team building agentic tooling was solving the same problem in isolation, with no shared contract for how payments context should reach a model or how a model's actions should resolve back into the system.
Approach
Authored the MCP payment spec from scratch — the first of its kind at Coinbase.
Aligned Payments, Base App, and CDP stakeholders around one shared protocol instead of three parallel builds.
Drove the spec from draft to production, owning the program end to end as Senior Strategic Program Lead.
Built in automated resolution paths so the spec didn't just describe the system — it closed the loop on it.
Positioned the spec as reusable infrastructure other AI-payments initiatives could build on, not a one-off.
Outcome
Automated resolutions/mo
MCP spec at Coinbase
In production
Foundational to payments AI.
The spec shipped to production and now drives over 1,600 automated resolutions every month — work that used to require manual intervention now resolves itself, and it's the first protocol of its kind inside the company.
Reflection
"First at the company" isn't a headline I chase — it's what happens when you build the standard instead of waiting for someone else to.