In 2025, crypto traders increasingly turned to automated strategies as a volatile but largely range-bound market made it difficult to maintain directional bets, according to HTX's year-end review.
The Seychelles-based exchange (previously known as Huobi) said this trend is most evident in the increased use of grid-based trading bots on its Spot platform. According to HTX, grid trading volumes in 2025 increased by 97% year-on-year and capital allocated to grid strategies doubled.
This increase was particularly noticeable in stablecoin pairs, where grid trading volume increased by 352% year over year, compared to 122% for major cryptocurrencies. HTX says bots are typically used to capture small, repeated price movements, rather than betting on sustained market movements.
With grid trading, traders set price ranges and have automated orders execute buy and sell orders as the market moves back and forth.
According to CoinMarketCap, HTX ranks among the top 10 exchanges in the world in terms of trading volume, liquidity, and platform traffic.
sauce: coin market cap
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Coinbase expands use of AI agents across trading tools
While grid trading bots use fixed rules to automate their execution, AI-powered agents are built to make autonomous decisions, interact through natural language, and operate directly on-chain. Coinbase is one of the crypto exchanges most actively exploring AI agents.
CEO Brian Armstrong said that as early as August 2024, Coinbase was testing AI agents, including transactions in which one automated bot uses crypto tokens to interact with another AI system to purchase AI training data, a process he described as “tokens buying tokens.”
In October of the same year, Coinbase released “Based Agent.” It is a tool that allows users to create AI agents linked to cryptocurrency wallets for automated on-chain activities such as trading, swaps, and staking.
In October 2025, Coinbase introduced Payments MCP, a tool designed to allow AI agents to interact directly with on-chain financial services without the need for API keys. This system allows large language models to access wallets, onramps, and stablecoin payments through natural language prompts using model context protocols.
sauce: Coinbase Developer Platform
Interest in AI-managed trading appears to be growing, with around 36% of respondents in an April CoinGecko survey saying they would allow AI agents to manage the majority of their crypto holdings.
Still, some experts warn of risks. Aaron Ratcliffe, head of attribution at blockchain intelligence firm Merkle Science, told Cointelegraph that giving AI agents access to cryptocurrency wallets adds a new layer of trust to a system designed to be trustless, shifting much of the security responsibility to the user.
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