MoonPay Open-Sources the Wallet Layer for the Agent Economy

Backed by contributions from PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Tron, TON Foundation, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Base, Polygon, Sui, Filecoin Foundation, LayerZero, Dflow, Uniblock, Virtuals, Arbitrum, Dynamic, Allium, Simmer.Markets, and Circle.

NEW YORK, March 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- MoonPay, the leading global crypto payments network, launched the Open Wallet Standard (openwallet.sh), an open-source standard 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 is available today on GitHub, npm, and PyPI, with over 15 organizations contributing.

"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 of MoonPay

From MoonPay Agents to an Open Standard

The Open Wallet Standard grew out of MoonPay's own product development. In February 2026, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer that gives AI agents access to wallets, funds, and the ability to transact autonomously via MoonPay CLI. The product shipped with x402 compatibility and multi-chain support. Earlier this month, MoonPay integrated Ledger hardware signing into the agent stack, making it the first agent-focused wallet to support hardware-backed transaction approval.

In building that infrastructure, MoonPay hit the same problem facing every agent framework in the space: there is no shared standard for how AI agents interact with wallets. Every framework implements its own key management. Every integration builds its own signing logic. A wallet created for one agent cannot be used by another. Private keys end up in environment variables, plaintext config files, and proprietary formats. No portability. No shared security model.

MoonPay took the wallet infrastructure behind MoonPay Agents, generalized it across chains and runtimes, and released it under an MIT open-source license. That is the Open Wallet Standard.

The standard launches with contributions from over 15 organizations spanning every layer of the industry including PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Tron, TON Foundation, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Base, Polygon, Sui, Filecoin Foundation, LayerZero, Dflow, Uniblock, Virtuals, Arbitrum, Dynamic, Allium, Simmer.Markets, and Circle.

The Missing Layer

Over the past year, the agentic payments landscape has taken shape rapidly. Coinbase and Cloudflare created x402 for HTTP-native stablecoin payments. Google launched Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with over 60 partners for agent-driven commerce. 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.

These protocols were built independently. Together, they form the emerging stack for the agent economy. But they all assume the same thing: that the agent already has a wallet. None defines where the wallet lives, how keys are stored, or how one agent discovers a wallet created by another.

In practice, this means fragmentation. A user running three different tools or agents today has their funds scattered across three separate wallets that can't 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 Open Wallet Standard fills that gap: one encrypted vault on your machine, one interface for every chain, and a security model where the private key is never exposed to the agent, the LLM, or any parent process. 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. Protocols like x402 and MPP made machine payments possible. OWS makes them usable. With the Open Wallet Standard, the full stack for the agent economy is now in place.

The standard is not competing with existing protocols. It makes them more valuable. Any protocol that requires a signed transaction now has a common wallet to call. Any tool or agent that supports the standard can access the same wallet with the same funds, just as multiple apps on your phone can access the same bank account.

In practice: an AI agent holds a balance in an OWS vault. It receives a payment request over x402 for compute credits, an API call, or a dataset. The policy engine checks the request against the agent's spending limits. The wallet decrypts the key in an isolated process, signs the transaction, wipes the key from memory, and returns the signature. The agent pays. The service delivers. The private key was never exposed to the agent, the LLM context, or any parent application. The same wallet can open an MPP session, stream payments to a different service, and settle, without changing a line of wallet logic.

"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. Mysten Labs is thinking a lot about fundamental infrastructure for agents on Sui and is pleased to contribute to this standard." — Sam Blackshear, co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs, original contributors to Sui

"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 of TON Foundation

Open Source, Open Standard

The standard is MIT-licensed and modular by design: seven sub-specifications covering storage, signing, policies, agent access, key isolation, wallet lifecycle, and supported chains. Each module can be adopted independently. No proprietary formats or dependencies. Import from MetaMask. Export to any wallet.

The standard includes an open skills marketplace where anyone can publish wallet-compatible capabilities: signing plugins, compliance modules, chain adapters. No gatekeeping. The ecosystem grows beyond any single organization.

The Open Wallet Standard is the latest step in a deliberate shift at MoonPay toward AI-native infrastructure. Over the past year, the company has moved from on-ramp APIs to MoonPay CLI to MoonPay Agents with Ledger-secured hardware signing. Each step has given AI agents more direct, programmable access to the financial layer. The Open Wallet Standard makes that infrastructure available to every agent, every framework, and every chain.

How It Works

• Zero key exposure. AI agents operate inside LLM contexts where any data can surface in a prompt, a log, or a tool call. OWS ensures private keys are never accessible to the agent 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.

• Every chain, one interface. A single seed phrase derives accounts across eight chain families: EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos, Tron, TON, Spark, Filecoin, and XRP Ledger. One signing interface. CAIP-2 chain identifiers. A wallet created for one agent works with every protocol, every framework, and every chain.

• Policy-gated signing. Autonomous agents shouldn't have unlimited spending authority. A pre-signing policy engine evaluates every transaction before any key is touched. Spending limits, contract allowlists, chain restrictions, and time-bound authorizations are enforced at the wallet layer. The operator sets the rules. The agent operates within them.

• Agent-native access. Native SDK bindings for Node.js and Python, a CLI, and an MCP server interface. Agents built on Claude, ChatGPT, LangChain, or any MCP-compatible framework can access wallets through their native tool system.

• Local-first. The wallet vault lives on the user's machine. No cloud accounts, no remote key management, no network dependency for signing. The only network call is broadcasting a signed transaction.

Availability

• Install: curl -fsSL https://openwallet.sh/install.sh> | bash
• Node.js SDK: npm install @open-wallet-standard/core
• Python SDK: pip install open-wallet-standard
• Specification and source: github.com/open-wallet-standard
• Website: openwallet.sh

About MoonPay
Founded in 2019, MoonPay is a global financial technology company that helps businesses and consumers move value across fiat and digital assets. MoonPay has more than 30 million customers across 180 countries and supports more than 500 enterprise customers spanning crypto and fintech.

Through a single integration, MoonPay powers on- and off-ramps, trading, crypto payments, and stablecoin infrastructure, connecting traditional payment rails with blockchains.

MoonPay is how the world moves value.

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