How Coinbase went AI native with Mintlify

Success story snapshot

Challenge: The Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) documentation ran on a static site that couldn't serve the AI agents developers increasingly work with. To support the new workflows of developers, CDP needed documentation that was accessible for both humans and agents.

Solution: Coinbase partnered with Mintlify to launch an AI-native developer experience without expending what would have been months of engineering overhead. The result was brand new, AI-forward docs, fully shipped to production in just six weeks.

Key results:

• 6 weeks to a live, AI-native developer experience
• Reduced documentation updates from 20+ minutes to under 60 seconds
• 31,459 MCP tool calls to date; 59% of docs traffic is now from agents
• $226K in projected annualized support savings

Non-negotiable documentation quality

Coinbase is the leading platform for buying, selling, and storing digital assets, serving 120 million users worldwide. A major driver of that scale is the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP), which gives developers the APIs, tools, and documentation needed to build onchain. For Coinbase, the ease-of-use of their docs is a non-negotiable, as it determines whether developers get their first build working, and whether they choose CDP for their onchain work.

CDP's docs ran on a static site generator that made updates slow and wasn't designed to make content available to AI agents. Coinbase needed faster publishing and agent access without assigning engineers to build and maintain a new documentation platform.

"Onchain protocols evolve constantly, and every change impacts our docs," says Kevin Leffew, AI GTM Lead at Coinbase. "Publishing updates with our old setup kept us from moving at the speed we needed, since content freshness directly affects whether a developer's first build works—and whether they decide to continue working with us."

Six weeks and sixty seconds

After evaluating several vendors, Coinbase chose Mintlify. Its new CDP developer experience went live just six weeks later, and the value keeps compounding. Before Mintlify, a single documentation update could take more than 20 minutes. Now it takes under 60 seconds, ensuring content is always accurate and aligned with rapidly evolving onchain protocols.

Nearly 800 pushes to main to date. At a conservative estimate of 15 minutes of contributor time saved per push, that's roughly 200 hours (about five weeks of full-time work), or an estimated $15,000-$20,000 in internal efficiency gains at a $75-$100 hourly contributor cost.

A growing audience of agents

Thanks to Mintlify's AI-native platform, CDP's knowledge is now built to serve its growing volume of agent traffic, with Markdown exports of every page, llms.txt for LLMs, and an MCP server for direct queries. Agents made 3,802 MCP tool calls in the first six weeks post-launch alone. Halfway through 2026, that figure has surpassed 30,000, and 145 distinct AI tools—including Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT—have fetched CDP documentation 2.93 million times. Today, 59% of CDP's total documentation traffic comes from agents.

"AI-native docs are essential when you're building with tools like MCP and x402," says Leffew. "Mintlify helps us deliver a developer experience at Coinbase that feels as agentic as the protocols we're shipping."

Giving support a helping hand

Agents dominate the traffic, but the developers reading CDP's docs directly have changed how they find answers too. Rather than browsing, they ask. The built-in AI assistant has fielded 40,459 queries year to date, averaging roughly 5,700 a month with sustained volume since launch.

The more questions CDP's AI assistant answers, the lighter the support team's load. Not every query would have become a support ticket, but applying even a conservative 15% deflection rate at $25 per ticket puts savings at roughly $152,000 so far this year.

Docs as a demand channel

Since switching to Mintlify, CDP has seen developers arrive directly at the content they need, with 98.3% of sessions starting on a page other than the docs homepage.

Better information architecture and automatic SEO and AEO optimization enable developers to land directly on the exact content they need to succeed. And once they're there, an interactive API playground lets them fire real API calls without leaving the page.

"Docs are the top of our funnel, not the bottom," says Leffew. "What better way to start a relationship than when a developer can land straight on the page they need and get to a working call in minutes?"

The bottom line

In six weeks, Coinbase went from a static documentation site to knowledge infrastructure that ships updates in seconds, answers developers on the spot, and hands its content to agents in the format they expect. And the team is far from finished.

"We recently launched a private preview doc site that's password protected via Mintlify," shares Leffew. "This is how we share beta APIs with select customers before public release, and so far it's been a big success."

Next up: leveraging Mintlify automations for style guide reviews and much more.