MoonPay has launched an open-source wallet standard aimed at giving AI agents a safer and more portable way to hold funds, sign transactions, and pay for services across blockchains, as competition builds around machine-driven commerce infrastructure.
Filling a Missing Piece
MoonPay said on Monday its new Open Wallet Standard, released under an MIT license, aims to address a gap that has quietly held back autonomous agents, as payment protocols for AI systems have advanced rapidly without a common wallet framework for those agents to store and use money.
That has left developers building separate wallet logic for each framework, often with private keys stored in insecure or incompatible formats. In practice, that fragmentation has made it harder for users to move funds across tools or let multiple agents draw from the same balance.
MoonPay said its standard allows one encrypted wallet vault to work across major chains while keeping private keys out of the reach of the agent itself, the large language model powering it, and any parent application. Instead, keys are decrypted only long enough to sign a transaction, then wiped from memory.
Built from its Own Agent Stack
The standard builds on MoonPay’s earlier work on MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer introduced in February that let AI agents access wallets and transact autonomously through MoonPay’s command-line tools.
MoonPay later added Ledger hardware signing, which it said made the system the first agent-focused wallet to support hardware-backed transaction approval, with backing from more than 15 organizations, including PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Circle, the TON Foundation, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, and Polygon, according to the company.
Designed for an Emerging Payments Ecosystem
The launch comes as projects race to shape how AI agents pay for compute, data, and online services, with MoonPay citing standards such as x402, Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol, and Ethereum’s ERC-8004 as signs the broader ecosystem is taking shape.
Its argument is that those systems assume an agent already has a wallet, without setting out how that wallet should be shared, secured, or discovered across tools.
MoonPay said its standard is meant to complement those efforts as a common wallet layer, with support for multiple chain families, Node.js and Python SDKs, and policy controls that allow operators to cap spending, restrict networks, and approve only selected contracts.
Crypto’s Growing Bet on Autonomous Payments
In February, Coinbase introduced Agentic Wallets, a framework designed to let AI agents store, send, and trade crypto assets on their own, moving them closer to execution rather than simple assistance.
The system includes built-in tools for authentication, funding, trading, and earning while using the x402 protocol for autonomous payments tied to APIs, computing power, and premium data. Coinbase has also said users will be able to make gasless transactions with any token on Base.
The push reflects a broader industry view that stablecoins and blockchain-based payment systems could become the backbone of AI commerce, with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire saying in January that software agents would need a native internet-speed payment system and that stablecoins are better suited than banks or card networks for high-volume, low-cost microtransactions.
