MoonPay has launched PayBox, a payment vault that integrates directly with Claude and ChatGPT, enabling AI agents to execute transactions on behalf of users. The product is designed to bridge the gap between AI assistants' ability to research purchases and their ability to actually complete them—a friction point that has persisted since chatbots entered mainstream use.

PayBox functions as a secure digital safe that stores both crypto wallets and payment cards. Users instruct the chatbot on what they want, the AI arranges the transaction, and the user approves it via a passkey—a secure digital key stored on a device, similar to Face ID for payments. The funds then move automatically.

"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 users still had to open a browser, log into a payment service, and complete transactions manually. PayBox aims to close that gap.

Launch integrations include restaurant reservations, flight bookings, and shopping across major online retailers. Users can also swap tokens, bridge funds between blockchains, and route money into DeFi protocols such as Aave.

PayBox supports Solana and seven Ethereum-compatible chains at launch: Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum, and Polygon. It also works with x402, an open payment protocol that repurposes HTTP 402—a "Payment Required" status code reserved in the original HTTP specification but left largely unused for decades—originally developed by Coinbase and subsequently donated to the Linux Foundation. x402 is backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, AWS, and Anthropic, and enables AI agents to pay any service designed to accept agent-initiated transactions. The breadth of that backing signals active investment across both traditional payment networks and e-commerce infrastructure in enabling AI-driven checkout.

MoonPay has been building toward this launch throughout 2026. In March, the company released an open wallet standard for AI agents, backed by PayPal, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Solana Foundation. In May, it launched an app allowing users to buy crypto inside ChatGPT, though that version still redirected users to a checkout page. In June, MoonPay shipped a desktop app connecting Claude and Codex directly to crypto wallets.

The infrastructure powering PayBox comes from Sodot, an Israeli key management startup that MoonPay acquired for approximately $100 million in an all-stock deal in April. Sodot's technology already secures more than $50 billion in assets and over 10 million wallets for clients including eToro and BitGo.

Wallet keys are split using multi-party computation (MPC), a cryptographic technique in which a private key is divided into separate fragments held by different parties, ensuring no single party can access user funds independently. Those fragments are stored in trusted execution environments (TEEs)—isolated zones within hardware that protect sensitive data even from the server running the software. This architecture takes on added significance in agent-mediated payments, where a chatbot handling transaction instructions introduces an additional party that could theoretically be targeted for credential theft or social-engineering attacks.

"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," the company stated in its launch announcement.

Card payments route through Visa's agentic commerce protocol, meaning the AI processes payments without ever accessing the user's actual card number, reducing the risk of credential leaks and reuse.

MoonPay positions PayBox as a solution to what it describes as a structural problem in 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."