In Brief:
- PayBox, MoonPay’s newly launched non-custodial payment vault, allows people using ChatGPT and Claude to shift crypto around and pay merchants without leaving the chat window. The product can be found at paybox.sh.
- At launch the vault covers Solana alongside Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Hyperliquid, Tempo and Robinhood Chain, and it splits keys through MPC inside secure enclaves so that signing is impossible for MoonPay or the agent acting alone.
- The launch represents MoonPay’s wager that agentic payments should live on open rails instead of one company’s walled garden — and it arrives in a market that has yet to work out how fraud or disputes get handled.
Wednesday saw MoonPay roll out PayBox, a non-custodial vault through which ChatGPT and Claude users can trade, bridge and make purchases simply by typing a request into a chat window. Anyone can access the product now at paybox.sh.
Crypto wallets and payment cards sit side by side in the vault, which hooks into either assistant by way of a custom connector. The user spells out what they want, the AI assembles the transaction, and nothing actually moves until a passkey signature confirms it.
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 ↗
Day-one support spans Solana as well as the EVM-compatible networks Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum and Polygon. MoonPay said additional chains are on the way.
Among the example prompts in the company’s materials: onramping into PYUSD, swapping PYUSD to SOL, bridging funds and maximizing yield on Aave. The same flow handles booking a flight or reserving a dinner table.
How the keys are held
Multi-party computation splits wallet keys across hardware-isolated trusted execution environments. That means no single party — MoonPay and the AI agent included — is able to rebuild a complete private key or sign a transaction on its own.
The underlying infrastructure comes by way of Sodot, the key management firm MoonPay bought earlier this year. By MoonPay’s account, Sodot’s technology protects upwards of 10 million wallets and more than $50 billion in digital assets.
For card payments, the system relies on Visa’s agentic commerce protocol. A card can be charged by PayBox without the underlying number ever being seen or stored, limiting the damage an agent could do by leaking data if something goes wrong.
Two permission modes
There’s a choice of two settings: “Always Ask,” under which every transaction needs passkey approval, and “Autonomous,” which permits the assistant to transact inside limits the user sets. Moving from one mode to the other calls for a new passkey approval. Authorizations are scoped to one action apiece, cannot be reused and are revocable.
The whole setup takes place within the assistant. A user opens an account, registers a passkey, then creates or imports a wallet and, if desired, adds cards. Funds arrive either from an existing wallet or from a payment card once MoonPay’s identity verification clears. Neither coding nor a separate software install is required.
x402 and the first merchants
x402 gives PayBox a route to pay any service designed to accept agent-initiated payments. The initial integrations handle restaurant reservations through AgentRes.dev, shopping through Purch.xyz and flight bookings through BRIJ.fi.
x402 began life at Coinbase. Governance has since passed to the Linux Foundation, which has backing from over 20 organizations, among them AWS, Cloudflare, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify and Anthropic.
The open-rails pitch
MoonPay Labs chief engineer Neeraj Prasad presented the product as a deliberate answer to the closed systems that larger companies are assembling.
“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.
Other AI platforms should gain support within the next month, according to Prasad. He added that MoonPay intends to extend PayBox further into DeFi — token swaps, perpetual futures trading and liquidity management — with the same user-defined approval rules applying throughout.
MoonPay CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright was blunter 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
Online spending attributable to agentic commerce remains minimal, and how PayBox deals with erroneous or fraudulent purchases has not been made clear, Fortune reported. The sector as a whole has yet to settle dispute resolution.
Getting in front of users is the second obstacle. MoonPay’s reputation rests largely on backend infrastructure for its 1,700-plus enterprise clients rather than on consumer recognition, whereas Robinhood and Visa are constructing rival AI commerce tools atop customer bases already in hand.
“The card hid the cash. The phone hid the card. This is the era where money disappears into conversation,” Soto-Wright said.