MoonPay CEO Asks Claude to Book a Flight Before Stuffing a Crypto Wallet into the Chatbox

AI can exchange currencies, order food, and access Kamino, with keys held by no one, and the race for agent payments has begun.

Written by: Forbes

Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

MoonPay founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright tried it himself: he had Claude help him book a flight. The flight was completed, the ticket was secured, and the payment was made. The entire process stayed within the chatbox, without opening a separate webpage for checkout.

The CEO first had Claude book his flight, and the next step is to get users' wallets. Soto-Wright told reporters directly: PayBox allows agents like Claude and ChatGPT to hold cards and crypto wallets to complete payments, while the private keys are not controlled by any single party.

This is not just a demonstration. It corresponds to a year-long competition among payment companies and model vendors for a position—transforming conversations from "giving suggestions" to "placing orders." Whoever can securely embed money into the chatbox first will be closer to the next generation of checkout.

The Missing Mile in the Chatbox

In the past year, Claude and ChatGPT have been able to check flights, compare hotels, create shopping lists, and write investment memos. The sticking point has always been the same: when it comes time to pay, users still have to open their browsers, log into their accounts, and click confirm. OpenAI once experimented with instant checkout within chat, but later scaled back; many products stop at "I found it for you, now you go buy it yourself."

What PayBox aims to fill is this last mile. Launched on July 29, the entry point is paybox.sh. The official positioning is as an AI payment vault: agents can trade on the open internet without users having to leave the chat or entrust funds to AI or platforms. The connection method is a custom connector within Claude and ChatGPT. On August 31, it integrated with Grok, and the team stated that the integration took about two days—once standardized connectors are rolled out, scaling on the model side will be quick.

Users can issue commands in natural language, such as "Deposit $100 to buy PYUSD," "Convert $100 PYUSD to SOL," "Bridge funds to Robinhood Chain," "Maximize yield with Aave," "Help me book a flight," or "Reserve a dinner spot for tonight." AI is responsible for research, price comparison, and preparing transactions, and users approve with a passkey before any money moves.

The day after launch, MoonPay reported that paybox.sh had 224,000 sign-ups and claimed to be "the fastest-spreading product in crypto × AI," even stating, "It might have filled Claude up." The numbers were released unilaterally by the company, making it hard to verify, but at least it indicates that embedding a wallet into an interface that billions of people use daily is easier to scale than creating a standalone app.

A Vault Holding Both Cards and On-Chain Wallets

PayBox contains two types of items that agents need when spending money. One type is payment cards: agents can initiate payments but cannot see or store the original card number, with card transactions going through Visa's agent business agreements. The other type is a crypto wallet: users can create or import wallets, with funds coming from existing wallets or deposited via a one-time identity verification with MoonPay.

The on-chain launch supports Solana, as well as Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum, Polygon, and other EVM-compatible networks. The payment layer connects to x402—the machine payment standard initially open-sourced by Coinbase and now governed by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Servers request money from agents using HTTP 402, and agents settle instantly with stablecoins, without needing to open accounts, subscribe, or go through a checkout. When the foundation officially operates in July 2026, founding members will include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Shopify, AWS, Google, Circle, and MoonPay itself.

The consumption scenarios connected on launch day included: AgentRes.dev for restaurant reservations, Purch.xyz for shopping, and BRIJ.fi for flight bookings. On the on-chain side, users can exchange, cross-chain, or import funds into Aave. On August 27, it also connected with the Solana lending protocol Kamino, allowing qualified users to deposit and earn yields in the chat, using collateral to borrow USDC. This is not a new loan product; it simply brings Kamino's existing market into the chatbox. It is currently unavailable in the U.S., U.K., EU, and Australia, and asset and jurisdictional restrictions will be further refined. After Grok's integration, these limitations have not been lifted.

Permissions are divided into two tiers. One tier is "always ask," requiring a passkey for every transaction. The other tier is "autonomous mode," where AI can only act within user-defined limits and rules. Changing permissions must be re-approved by the user, and authorizations can be revoked at any time. A phrase the company emphasizes repeatedly is: AI can research, compare prices, and create plans all day, but money only moves according to user rules.

Splitting Keys: The Pivot of the Entire Narrative

Agent payments fear three things: a stolen credential that can be used everywhere, a card number that can be repeatedly charged after being leaked, and a single-point system that can be breached to transfer funds.

PayBox's answer is very specific. Wallet keys are split using threshold cryptography (MPC) and placed in a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment (TEE). MoonPay, AI agents, and user phones cannot reconstruct the complete private key or sign transactions independently. If a phone is compromised, the missing key pieces are not located in the same place. Each passkey approval is only valid for a single action, becoming invalid after use; if intercepted, it cannot be replayed or expanded into broader permissions.

This foundation comes from MoonPay's acquisition of the Israeli key management company Sodot for about $100 million in stock earlier this year. Sodot claims to protect over $50 billion in assets and over 10 million wallets for crypto companies. Coupled with MoonPay's platform serving over 1,700 enterprise clients, it forms the infrastructure behind each vault.

The official summary of this design is "autonomous but not custodial." Existing products often force users to make choices: if they want agents to place orders autonomously, they must entrust funds to the platform, agents, or custodial wallets. PayBox's design ensures that neither MoonPay nor AI can unilaterally access funds or credentials. There are no terminals, no custodial handovers, and no closed marketplaces.

This is certainly not risk-free. Prompt injection, phishing dialogues, and supply chain attacks can lead users to approve money within "limits." The vault can prevent "keys being stolen in bulk," but cannot stop "users being led astray by dialogue and clicking confirm themselves." Autonomous mode shifts the approval authority forward; convenience and risk are two sides of the same coin.

MoonPay has spent this year moving payments into conversations.

PayBox did not emerge suddenly. In March 2026, the company released an open wallet standard for AI agents, with endorsements from PayPal, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Solana Foundation. In May, users could buy cryptocurrencies within ChatGPT, but still had to jump to checkout. In June, the desktop application MoonAgents directly connected Claude Code and Codex to wallets, exchanges, and prediction markets. In June, it also acquired Entendre, which develops AI accounting agents, incorporating reconciliation, vaults, and closing accounts behind stablecoin transactions. Concurrently, there was also stablecoin infrastructure for enterprises and plans for virtual cards from Mastercard for agents to spend stablecoins.

On July 29, PayBox launched with Claude and ChatGPT. In August, it integrated Cash App for deposits and brought Kamino into the vault. On August 31, it expanded to Grok. The path is clear: first, facilitate deposits, then enable transactions within conversations, then integrate lending and yield, and finally deploy the same vault across more assistants.

The company is also quite large. Founded in 2019, it serves over 30 million users across 180 countries, with over 1,700 enterprise clients, covering deposits, withdrawals, trading, business, and stablecoin infrastructure. Licenses include New York BitLicense, New York limited-purpose trust license, U.S. multi-state money transmission licenses, and EU MiCA authorization. Former CFTC acting chair Caroline Pham has joined as Chief Legal and Administrative Officer. The regulatory narrative and product narrative are intertwined: once agents can hold cards and currencies, compliance must keep pace.

The Race Involves More Than Just MoonPay

In the summer of 2026, agent payments moved from PPT to launch. Card organizations are moving towards licensed networks: Visa is promoting trusted agent protocols and intelligent commerce, while Mastercard is pushing Agent Pay for Machines, using tokenized credentials instead of raw card numbers. Model vendors are focusing on checkout: OpenAI and Stripe jointly open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which governs the shopping cart layer. Google's AP2 manages authorization and intent proof. Coinbase's x402 governs "settling once per HTTP request," with settlements mostly in stablecoins.

These protocols do not completely conflict; rather, they stack on different layers. x402 handles small, per-transaction settlements on the machine side; ACP manages consumer checkouts; AP2 verifies "whether this money is authorized by the person." Gartner provided a figure that large companies might use for budgeting: by 2028, B2B purchases initiated by agents could reach $15 trillion. On the other hand, independent analyses have poured cold water on this—while x402's cumulative transaction numbers on Base look large, the actual daily active amounts may be far less than advertised, with a significant portion being self-transactions and volume inflation.

MoonPay has chosen a rather tricky position: it does not build a closed marketplace nor only serve as a checkout button in a specific model, but creates a non-custodial vault that can be plugged into multiple assistants, connecting both card and on-chain tracks. Soto-Wright's quote, which has been repeatedly cited by various media, almost serves as the slogan for the entire narrative:

"Cards have hidden cash, and phones have hidden cards. Now we are in an era where money disappears into conversations. Billions of AI agents are about to go online, each needing to securely hold, transfer, and spend funds. Someone has to build a layer of trust for this world. We just did. PayBox is the product that MoonPay was meant to create."

Booking a Flight is Just an Entry Point

The reason booking a flight is highlighted in the title is that it is a sufficiently everyday task. Users can understand "having Claude buy the ticket" more intuitively than "having an agent maximize yield on Aave." However, what the product truly aims to unlock is the subsequent series: exchanging currencies, cross-chain transactions, entering lending pools, making payments to merchants, and executing automatically within limits.

Currently, the penetration rate remains thin. Features like Kamino are unavailable in major jurisdictions, Grok requires users to add connectors themselves, the extent of autonomous mode depends on personal risk control, and the real commercial scale of x402 does not align with the grand narrative. But the direction is hard to reverse. The questions assistants are asked daily are no longer just about "which flight is cheaper," but rather "help me buy it."

The CEO has already bought a ticket. The product is now open to Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok. The remaining questions are very specific: when the chatbox starts interacting with wallets, will users be willing to relinquish approval authority; and whether this design of "no one holding the keys" can maintain the balance between convenience and loss of control in real traffic.