MoonPay Launches PayBox to Let AI Agents Move Money Without Custody Risk

New updates have been reported about MoonPay.

MoonPay has introduced PayBox, a payment vault that lets AI agents inside Claude and ChatGPT execute transactions across the open internet while leaving full control of funds with the user. By connecting a custom PayBox connector, users can have their AI onramp into stablecoins, trade tokens, interact with DeFi protocols, or book travel and restaurant reservations, with every transaction prepared by the AI but approved via a user passkey before money moves.

The launch positions MoonPay at the center of emerging agentic commerce by combining its on-ramp, trading, and payments infrastructure with x402, an open standard for AI-initiated payments that enables spending at any compatible online service. PayBox initially supports Solana and EVM chains including Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain, Hyperliquid, and Tempo, with additional integrations planned, extending MoonPay’s reach into onchain activity driven directly from conversational interfaces.

CEO Ivan Soto-Wright describes PayBox as the “trust layer” for billions of future AI agents, framing the product as the culmination of MoonPay’s strategy to bridge fiat and digital assets while maintaining user control. The vault stores card credentials and crypto wallets using threshold cryptography and secure enclaves so that no single party — not MoonPay, the AI agent, or the user’s device — can access a complete private key or sign transactions independently, addressing key fraud vectors around stolen credentials, leaked card numbers, and compromised systems.

Card-based payments inside PayBox rely on Visa’s agentic commerce protocol, enabling AI to transact without exposing raw card numbers and reducing downstream fraud risk for users and merchants. Each transaction is gated by passkey-based approvals that are scoped to a single action and expire after use, and users can choose between an “Always Ask” mode, where every payment requires explicit sign-off, or an “Autonomous” mode, where the AI operates within defined spending and risk limits.

PayBox’s security model builds on Sodot’s key management infrastructure, which MoonPay acquired earlier this year and which already secures more than $50 billion in assets and over 10 million wallets for leading crypto firms. By integrating Sodot’s MPC-based key management into its platform serving over 1,700 enterprise clients and 30 million consumers across 180 countries, MoonPay is effectively repurposing its existing regulated infrastructure — including a New York BitLicense, trust charter, and MiCA authorization in the EU — to support AI-native payment flows.

Operationally, onboarding to PayBox involves installing the connector in Claude or ChatGPT, creating an account, registering a passkey, and either importing an existing wallet or adding payment cards funded via MoonPay’s one-time identity verification. Once configured, AI agents can continuously research and structure transactions across stablecoins, crypto, and traditional methods, but settlement will only occur according to the user’s permission profile, which can be changed or revoked instantly.

Strategically, PayBox addresses a core limitation of current AI assistants, which until now could generate plans and code but could not move value on behalf of the user without involving custodial solutions, proprietary marketplaces, or developer tooling. MoonPay’s non-custodial architecture removes that trade-off, creating a potentially defensible position in AI payments by enabling autonomous transaction initiation from mainstream AI platforms while keeping compliance and control on the user side.

MoonPay plans to extend PayBox to additional AI interfaces and deepen its capabilities in decentralized finance, allowing agents to route swaps, manage liquidity, and trade derivatives such as perpetual futures under user-defined approval rules. For executives and investors, the product opens a new growth vector that sits at the intersection of AI, payments, and Web3 infrastructure, and could drive increased transaction volume across MoonPay’s rails as agent-based commerce scales. PayBox is available immediately at paybox.sh, giving MoonPay an early mover advantage in defining standards and trust mechanisms for AI-driven financial activity on the open internet.