The mechanics are fairly straightforward. The vault acts as a secure digital safe that stores both crypto wallets and payment cards. You tell the chatbot what you want. The AI then lines up the transaction. You approve it with a passkey (a secure digital key stored on your phone or device, like Face ID for payments). The money then moves.
"The card hid the cash. The phone hid the card. This is the era where money disappears into conversation," MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in a statement. "Billions of AI agents are coming online, and every one of them will need to hold, move, and spend money safely.” (Disclosure: MoonPay Ventures is an investor in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)
Until now, Claude and ChatGPT could research investments, compare flight prices, and plan purchases—but couldn't complete them. You still had to open a browser, log into a payment service, and do the actual transaction yourself. PayBox aims to close that gap.
PayBox supports Solana and seven Ethereum-compatible chains (Ethereum itself, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum, and Polygon) at launch. It also works with x402, an open payment protocol that Coinbase developed and has since donated to the Linux Foundation—now backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, AWS, and Anthropic—that lets AI agents pay any service built to accept agent-initiated transactions.
Wallet keys are split using MPC—multi-party computation, a cryptographic technique where a private key is broken into separate pieces held by different parties, so no single one can access your funds on its own. Those fragments are stored in TEEs (trusted execution environments—isolated zones in hardware that protect sensitive data even from the server running the software).
Per the company's launch announcement, "wallet keys are split via MPC across hardware-isolated enclaves, so no device, session, or party, not MoonPay, not the AI agent, ever holds a complete key or can sign alone."
Card payments route through Visa's agentic commerce protocol. That means the AI processes the payment without ever seeing your actual card number—reducing the risk of credentials leaking and being reused.
MoonPay frames PayBox as solving a structural problem that's plagued existing products. "Existing products force a tradeoff between convenience and control: to let an agent transact autonomously, the user typically has to authorize it to take custody of funds outright, trusting a single party, the platform, the agent, or a hosted wallet, to hold and move that money safely," the company said. "PayBox is built so no party, including MoonPay and the AI itself, can unilaterally access the user's funds or credentials."
