MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs to Launch AI Trading Copilot for Prediction Markets

MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launches AI Trading Copilot for Prediction Markets - Decrypt

MoonPay said the product launches first with support for Polymarket. MoonPay is expanding further into AI-powered cryptocurrency infrastructure with the acquisition of Dawn Labs, a startup building autonomous trading tools for prediction markets and digital asset traders. The crypto payments company said Monday that it acquired the applied research lab and launched Dawn CLI, an AI-native trading product designed to let users build and execute trading strategies using natural language prompts. (Disclosure: MoonPay Ventures is an investor in Dastan, the parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.) "Until now, building and running a systematic trading strategy required you to be a developer, a quant, and a portfolio manager," Dawn Labs founder and Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs Neeraj Prasad told Decrypt. "Dawn collapses that into a single interface. You describe what you want in plain English, and the system handles the code and execution." The launch comes as prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi see sizable growth, attracting traders betting on elections, sports, economic indicators, and geopolitical events. The growth of those markets has increased demand for tools that can analyze information, automate trades, and react quickly across multiple platforms. "We're starting with prediction markets because they are one of the fastest-growing sectors, and many traders in the space are underserved by existing tooling," Prasad said. Prasad said the platform will launch initially with support for Polymarket, with plans to expand to additional trading venues and asset types in the coming months. The move reflects a broader push across crypto and fintech to build AI agents capable of interacting directly with financial systems. In April, cryptocurrency exchange Gemini launched an agentic trading feature for AI agents, while Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon recently launched AI stablecoin payment rails, and Solana and Google did much the same. While AI has increasingly become a part of the cryptocurrency landscape, Prasad said MoonPay does not view AI agents and human users as separate customer bases: The tech is designed to work for traders of all sorts. "We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend," he said. "Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of AI agents. Each one makes it easier for both humans and agents to move value. Dawn is the latest example. A human sets the strategy, and the agent executes it." The rise of autonomous trading agents has raised concerns about hallucinated strategies, unintended trades, and execution failures, particularly as AI systems begin handling real capital. Prasad said Dawn addresses those risks through non-custodial wallets created locally through the Open Wallet Standard, a reviewable strategy code that users can inspect before deployment, along with policy controls that limit how much an agent can trade, which markets it can access, and how positions are sized. The news also comes as MoonPay pushes further into AI-focused infrastructure. In recent months, the company has launched an open-source wallet standard for AI agents, introduced a stablecoin debit card for autonomous AI models, and acquired crypto key management firm Sodot as part of a broader institutional expansion. "The team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea," MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in a statement. "With Dawn, AI agents can develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies autonomously. That is what this next chapter of MoonPay is about."

MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launches AI Tool in Prediction Markets Push

The payments company acquired Dawn Labs for an undisclosed amount, immediately announcing the creation of an AI tool that would provide "custom strategies" for trading on prediction markets. Financial technology company MoonPay announced the launch of an AI technology tool for trading strategies on prediction markets following its acquisition of Dawn Labs for an undisclosed amount. MoonPay said Monday that it had launched Dawn CLI in an effort to facilitate trading strategies "in plain English," citing activity on prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad said the tool will democratize trading "by general intelligence." "Prediction markets are one of the fastest-growing categories, attracting a new generation of active traders across platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi," MoonPay said in its announcement. "These traders use signals from social media, automated strategies and cross-platform positioning, but the infrastructure required for high performance remains fragmented, manual and technically demanding." Source: MoonPay The move closer to prediction markets comes as Kalshi and Polymarket face several state-level lawsuits over allegations that the companies are illegally facilitating sports betting and other activities not permitted by state law. Until December 2025, Caroline Pham, MoonPay's chief legal officer, was a commissioner and acting chair at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which has since claimed exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets. Related: MoonPay releases open-source wallet standard for AI agents Trading on prediction markets continues to be under scrutiny by many US lawmakers and industry leaders given the platform's models often allowing insider trading. In April, a soldier was charged with using classified information about the US military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to make more than $400,000 through event contracts on Polymarket. MoonPay's acquisition followed prediction markets platform Kalshi closing a $1 billion funding round last week, resulting in the company reaching a valuation of about $22 billion. The move effectively doubled Kalshi's valuation in five months.