MoonPay has joined the growing list of crypto firms to integrate features friendly with AI agents to its platform this week. On Monday, the New York-headquartered company open-sourced the Open Wallet Standard (OWS). Coinbase’s x402 protocol that is capable of facilitating autonomous machine-to-machine commerce makes for the foundation layer for the OWS.
The OWS is aimed at letting AI agents to tore keys, manage wallets, and sign transactions across a multi-blockchain ecosystem, MoonPay said in its announcement post on Monday.
“For the first time AI agents can pay for things — APIs, compute, data — without a human in the loop. Open Wallet Standard is an open protocol for local wallet storage and signing, designed for AI agents and the tools that serve them,” the crypto infrastructure provider said.
MoonPay clarified that the OWS is not a payment protocol. Instead, it has been explained as a wallet layer that supports payment protocols.
“Every payment protocol needs a wallet underneath it. We think that wallet should be open, local, and the same everywhere. Keys never leave your machine,” the platform said.
A total of 21 Web3 firms have come together to develop the OWS. These include PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Tron, Solana Foundation, Polygon, and Circle among others.
Many from these 21 companies have also started integrating the OWS into their own software development kits (SDKs), which are pre-built app tools and interfaces that developers can use to generate new apps with as little coding as possible.
AI agents are rapidly making inroads into crypto payment interfaces, that are already seen as the emerging future of the financial fabric that we know, use, and understand today.
Goldman Sachs-backed fintech firm Stripe, back in February, unveiled a new payment feature that would essentially allow AI agents participate in financial transactions directly with the developers using the USDC stablecoin.
OKX, Circle, and Coinbase are other names from the crypto arena that have welcomed AI agents into their respective ecosystems in recent months.
Given the influx of AI into finance, intelligence firms have already started accelerating work to amp up the security of AI agents. SlowMist and OpenAI are among companies that have proposed security upgrades for AI agents in recent weeks.