Lincoln Murr

Lincoln Murr is a product manager at Coinbase whose work includes x402 payments for AI agents and Coinbase Advisor, an AI-powered investment guidance product. His career has moved from studying how blockchains reach agreement to building products that use financial infrastructure.

Murr first bought Bitcoin at age 12, before he had a bank account. At Vanderbilt University, he co-founded its blockchain club; an early Ethereum Foundation grant helped the group host a celebration of the Merge. He went on to participate in the Devcon Scholars Program and the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. During his studies in computer science and applied mathematics, he also worked as a blockchain product manager at Prescryptive and a graduate researcher in Vanderbilt’s HIDe lab. His account of that period describes how the foundation’s grants and programs helped shape his path.

Researching faster finality

During the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship, Murr spent a year studying single-slot finality: making a transaction effectively irreversible in the same slot in which it is proposed. His 2024 thesis examined consensus mechanisms and the tradeoffs between safety, liveness and finality. At the time, Ethereum finality took approximately 15 minutes; faster finality could shorten that wait and make communication between Ethereum and its scaling networks more immediate. The thesis also introduced fast-finality constructions based on a single-vote consensus protocol.

Murr also studied AI-assisted programming with Morgan Grainger and David Gao. Their 2023 paper compared how models generated Python solutions for 104 coding problems when given prompts with different levels of specificity. They measured both accuracy and the time and space efficiency of the resulting code.

Building at Coinbase

Murr joined Coinbase as an associate product manager and worked on x402, which he describes as payment infrastructure for an internet of AI agents.

With John Peterson and Alex Burkhardt, he proposed and built Coinbase Advisor through the company’s Next Bets program. As product lead, Murr described an assistant designed to turn natural-language requests into investment guidance using Coinbase’s products and data. In its initial demonstration, Advisor considered a user’s holdings, goals and risk tolerance when suggesting a portfolio, and presented news and insights relevant to that portfolio. The beta launched to select Coinbase One subscribers.