In Brief:
- MoonPay launched PayBox, a non-custodial payment vault that lets ChatGPT and Claude users move crypto and pay merchants from inside a chat window. It’s live at paybox.sh.
- The vault launched with Solana plus Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Hyperliquid, Tempo and Robinhood Chain, with keys split via MPC across secure enclaves so neither MoonPay nor the agent can sign alone.
- It’s MoonPay’s bet that agentic payments belong on open rails rather than inside a single company’s walled garden, and it lands in a market with no settled answer for fraud or disputes.
MoonPay launched PayBox on Wednesday, a non-custodial vault that lets ChatGPT and Claude users trade, bridge and buy things by typing a request into a chat window. The product is live at paybox.sh.
The vault holds crypto wallets and payment cards together and connects to either assistant through a custom connector. A user describes what they want. The AI prepares the transaction. Nothing moves until the user signs off with a passkey.
every Claude and ChatGPT user now has the power to trade anything on @solana by having a conversation
welcome to PayBox, the payment vault and non-custodial wallet that lets AI Agents securely transact across the open internet
prompt, approve, pay: http://paybox.sh@MoonPayView on X ↗
PayBox launched with support for Solana and EVM-compatible chains including Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum and Polygon. More are coming, MoonPay said.
Sample prompts in the company’s materials include onramping into PYUSD, swapping PYUSD to SOL, bridging funds and maximizing yield on Aave. Booking a flight or a dinner reservation runs through the same flow.
How the keys are held
Wallet keys are split using multi-party computation across hardware-isolated trusted execution environments. No single party, MoonPay and the AI agent included, can reconstruct a full private key or sign a transaction independently.
That infrastructure comes from Sodot, the key management company MoonPay acquired earlier this year. Sodot’s technology secures more than 10 million wallets and over $50 billion in digital assets, according to MoonPay.
Card payments run through Visa’s agentic commerce protocol. PayBox can charge a card without ever seeing or storing the underlying number, which caps what an agent could leak if something goes wrong.
Two permission modes
Users choose between “Always Ask,” which requires a passkey approval on every transaction, and “Autonomous,” which lets the assistant transact within limits the user defines. Switching between them requires a fresh passkey approval. Each authorization is scoped to a single action, can’t be reused and can be revoked.
Setup happens inside the assistant. Users create an account, register a passkey, then create or import a wallet and optionally add cards. Funding comes from an existing wallet or from a payment card after MoonPay’s identity verification. No coding or separate software install is involved.
x402 and the first merchants
Through x402, PayBox can pay any service built to accept agent-initiated payments. The first integrations cover restaurant reservations via AgentRes.dev, shopping via Purch.xyz and flight bookings via BRIJ.fi.
Coinbase originally developed x402. The Linux Foundation governs it now, with backing from more than 20 organizations including AWS, Cloudflare, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify and Anthropic.
The open-rails pitch
Neeraj Prasad, chief engineer at MoonPay Labs, framed the product as a direct counter to the closed systems bigger companies are building.
“The giants are building agentic payments inside their own walls; we’re the opposite bet: your own money, on open rails, reaching everything the walled versions can’t, from a dinner reservation to a DeFi protocol,” Prasad said.
Support for additional AI platforms is expected within the next month, Prasad said. He said MoonPay also plans to push PayBox deeper into DeFi with token swaps, perpetual futures trading and liquidity management, all under the same user-defined approval rules.
Ivan Soto-Wright, MoonPay’s CEO and founder, put it in blunter terms in the announcement. “Billions of AI agents are coming online, and every one of them will need to hold, move, and spend money safely. Someone had to build the trust layer for that world. We just did,” Soto-Wright said.
The open questions
Agentic commerce is still a tiny share of online spending, and it isn’t clear how PayBox handles mistaken or fraudulent purchases, Fortune reported. Dispute resolution is unsettled across the sector.
Distribution is the other hurdle. MoonPay is known mainly as backend infrastructure serving more than 1,700 enterprise clients rather than as a consumer brand, while Robinhood and Visa are building competing AI commerce tools on top of customer bases they already have.
“The card hid the cash. The phone hid the card. This is the era where money disappears into conversation,” Soto-Wright said.
