MoonPay, a crypto payments infrastructure company, has unveiled the Open Wallet Standard (OWS), an open-source framework designed to allow AI agents to manage funds and carry out transactions across multiple blockchain networks. The standard was announced on Monday and represents what the company describes as a deliberate move toward AI-native infrastructure. It addresses longstanding fragmentation issues in wallet and key management that have complicated financial operations for autonomous AI systems.
The OWS was developed with contributions from a broad coalition of industry participants, including PayPal, the Ethereum Foundation, the Solana Foundation, Ripple, OKX, Tron, the TON Foundation, and Base, among others. The involvement of these organisations signals wide industry interest in establishing a common infrastructure layer for AI-driven financial activity. MoonPay is also noted as an investor in Myriad, a sister company of Decrypt.
MoonPay co-founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright stated that the agent economy already had payment rails but lacked a wallet standard. He said the company built one, open-sourced it, and that the full stack now exists. The framework is intended to allow AI agents to handle financial operations without requiring them to manage the low-level complexities of individual blockchain architectures.
The OWS supports the x402 open payment protocol developed by Coinbase, as well as Stripe and Tempo‘s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), which is designed for session-based micropayments. The standard also builds on a prior collaboration between MoonPay and Ledger that enables hardware wallet signing for MoonPay Agents transactions. Together, these integrations aim to give AI agents access to a comprehensive and interoperable set of payment tools.
Mysten Labs co-founder and CTO Sam Blackshear commented on the technical rationale behind the standard, noting that on-chain payments originate from wallet addresses and that each blockchain represents them differently. He said a unified representation streamlines processes and allows agents to concentrate on high-level tasks rather than chain-specific implementation details. This perspective underscores the practical value of a shared standard across heterogeneous networks.
A key security feature of the OWS is that a wallet’s private key is never exposed to agents, the large language model context, or parent applications during transactions. This design choice is intended to reduce the risk of key compromise in environments where multiple systems interact with a shared wallet. MoonPay positions this as a foundational safeguard for deploying AI agents in financial contexts.
The launch arrives as demand grows for robust financial infrastructure capable of supporting autonomous AI systems. Other companies are also active in this space: Coinbase has introduced a wallet built specifically for AI agents with integrated guardrails, Stripe-backed Tempo Network is focused on enabling AI agent payment capabilities, and Sam Altman‘s World has tapped Coinbase’s protocol to verify the humans behind AI agents. The emergence of multiple competing and complementary initiatives points to agentic payments becoming a central concern for the broader crypto infrastructure sector.
Originally reported by Decrypt.
