MoonPay Open-Sources Universal Wallet Standard for AI Agents, Backed by PayPal, OKX, and Circle

MoonPay launched the Open Wallet Standard (OWS) on March 23, 2026, an open-source specification that gives AI agents a secure, universal way to hold value, sign transactions, and pay for services across every major blockchain without ever exposing a private key. The standard ships with contributions from more than 15 organizations including PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Circle, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, TON Foundation, Polygon, Sui, Base, Arbitrum, LayerZero, and Tron [1].

The Problem OWS Solves

The agentic payments stack has assembled rapidly over the past year. Coinbase and Cloudflare built x402 for HTTP-native stablecoin payments. Google launched Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with over 60 partners. Stripe and Tempo shipped the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for session-based micropayments. The Ethereum Foundation's ERC-8004 established on-chain identity registries for trustless agents. But all of these protocols assume the same thing: that the agent already has a wallet. None of them defines where the wallet lives, how keys are stored, or how one agent discovers a wallet created by another [1].

In practice, this means fragmentation. A user running three different AI tools today has funds scattered across three separate wallets that cannot see each other. The same $100 in stablecoins becomes $33 in three places with no way to access a single balance from all of them.

"The agent economy has payment rails. It didn't have a wallet standard. We built one, open-sourced it, and now the full stack exists."

• Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and co-founder, MoonPay [1]

How the Standard Works

OWS is built around a core security principle: the private key is never exposed to the agent, the LLM, or any parent process. Keys are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM, decrypted only to produce a signature, held in protected memory that cannot be swapped to disk, and wiped immediately after signing. The wallet vault lives locally on the user's machine with no cloud accounts, no remote key management, and no network dependency for signing. The only outbound call is broadcasting the signed transaction [1].

A single seed phrase derives accounts across eight chain families: EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos, Tron, TON, Spark, Filecoin, and XRP Ledger. The standard uses CAIP-2 chain identifiers, meaning a wallet created for one agent works with every protocol, every framework, and every chain [1].

A pre-signing policy engine evaluates every transaction before any key material is touched. Operators can set spending limits, contract allowlists, chain restrictions, and time-bound authorizations at the wallet layer. The agent operates within those constraints autonomously [1].

Interoperability With Existing Protocols

OWS positions itself not as a competitor to existing payment protocols but as the missing layer beneath them. When x402 returns a payment request, OWS produces the signed authorization. When MPP opens a session and streams micropayments, OWS signs each payment within the agent's authorized limits. The standard also includes an open skills marketplace where anyone can publish wallet-compatible capabilities: signing plugins, compliance modules, and chain adapters [1].

"On-chain payments originate from wallet addresses, and every chain represents them a bit differently. A unified representation makes it easier for an agent to focus on the high-level task instead of details."

• Sam Blackshear, co-founder and CTO, Mysten Labs (original contributors to Sui) [1]

"Nobody building a serious agent is going to limit it to one chain. The Open Wallet Standard treats every network as a first-class citizen, and that's why TON is contributing to it."

• Max Crown, President and CEO, TON Foundation [1]

From Product to Infrastructure

The standard evolved from MoonPay's own product development. In February 2026, the company launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer giving AI agents access to wallets and autonomous transaction capabilities via MoonPay CLI, with x402 compatibility and multi-chain support. Earlier in March, MoonPay integrated Ledger hardware signing into the agent stack, making it the first agent-focused wallet to support hardware-backed transaction approval [1].

MoonPay took the wallet infrastructure behind that product, generalized it across chains and runtimes, and released it under the MIT license. The standard is available today on GitHub, npm, and PyPI, with native SDK bindings for frameworks built on Claude, ChatGPT, LangChain, or any MCP-compatible system [1].

References

[1] MoonPay Press Release via PR Newswire (March 23, 2026)