MoonPay PayBox Puts Crypto Wallet Inside ChatGPT and Claude, Enabling AI Agents to Spend Money

MoonPay's PayBox Puts a Crypto Wallet Inside Claude and ChatGPT -- And Lets It Pay for Things

The product runs on technology from Sodot, the Israeli key management firm MoonPay acquired for roughly $100 million in April. MoonPay launched PayBox today -- a payment vault that plugs into Claude and ChatGPT and lets AI agents, software programs that complete tasks autonomously on your behalf, to actually spend money for you. The mechanics are fairly straightforward. The vault acts as a secure digital safe that stores both crypto wallets and payment cards. You tell the chatbot what you want. The AI then lines up the transaction. You approve it with a passkey (a secure digital key stored on your phone or device, like Face ID for payments). The money then moves. "The card hid the cash. The phone hid the card. This is the era where money disappears into conversation," MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in a statement. "Billions of AI agents are coming online, and every one of them will need to hold, move, and spend money safely." (Disclosure: MoonPay Ventures is an investor in Dastan, Decrypt's parent company.) Until now, Claude and ChatGPT could research investments, compare flight prices, and plan purchases -- but couldn't complete them. You still had to open a browser, log into a payment service, and do the actual transaction yourself. PayBox aims to close that gap. First integrations live at launch: restaurant reservations, flight bookings, and shopping across major online retailers. Users can also swap tokens, bridge funds between blockchains, and route money into DeFi protocols like Aave. PayBox supports Solana and seven Ethereum-compatible chains (Ethereum itself, Hyperliquid, Tempo, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum, and Polygon) at launch. It also works with x402, an open payment protocol that Coinbase developed and has since donated to the Linux Foundation -- now backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify, AWS, and Anthropic -- that lets AI agents pay any service built to accept agent-initiated transactions. PayBox didn't come out of nowhere. MoonPay has been building toward this for most of 2026. In March, the company released an open wallet standard for AI agents, backed by PayPal, the Ethereum Foundation, and the Solana Foundation. In May, it launched an app letting users buy crypto inside ChatGPT -- though that version still sent users to a checkout page to complete the purchase. In June, it shipped a desktop app connecting Claude and Codex to crypto wallets directly. The infrastructure underneath PayBox comes from Sodot, an Israeli key management startup MoonPay acquired for roughly $100 million in April, in an all-stock deal. Sodot's technology already secures more than $50 billion in assets and over 10 million wallets for clients including eToro and BitGo. Wallet keys are split using MPC -- multi-party computation, a cryptographic technique where a private key is broken into separate pieces held by different parties, so no single one can access your funds on its own. Those fragments are stored in TEEs (trusted execution environments -- isolated zones in hardware that protect sensitive data even from the server running the software). Per the company's launch announcement, "wallet keys are split via MPC across hardware-isolated enclaves, so no device, session, or party, not MoonPay, not the AI agent, ever holds a complete key or can sign alone." Card payments route through Visa's agentic commerce protocol. That means the AI processes the payment without ever seeing your actual card number -- reducing the risk of credentials leaking and being reused. MoonPay frames PayBox as solving a structural problem that's plagued existing products. "Existing products force a tradeoff between convenience and control: to let an agent transact autonomously, the user typically has to authorize it to take custody of funds outright, trusting a single party, the platform, the agent, or a hosted wallet, to hold and move that money safely," the company said. "PayBox is built so no party, including MoonPay and the AI itself, can unilaterally access the user's funds or credentials."

MoonPay Unveils PayBox AI Vault for ChatGPT and Claude Users

MoonPay's PayBox vault lets ChatGPT and Claude users authorize crypto purchases, token swaps and crosschain transactions while retaining custody of their assets. MoonPay has launched PayBox, a payment vault that lets ChatGPT and Claude users authorize AI to buy crypto, swap tokens and bridge assets from within a conversation while keeping control of their funds. Users connect a crypto wallet and payment methods to ChatGPT or Claude, which prepare transactions such as token swaps, crosschain transfers and DeFi interactions using natural-language prompts. Users can approve each transaction with a passkey or set spending limits that allow the AI to execute certain actions automatically, according to MoonPay. MoonPay said PayBox uses multi-party computation and trusted execution environments to protect wallet keys, preventing either the AI assistant or MoonPay from independently accessing user funds. The platform also lets users require approval for every transaction or allow AI to act autonomously within predefined spending and permission limits. PayBox supports multiple blockchains and payment methods, including debit cards, bank accounts, Apple Pay and PayPal, according to MoonPay. The company said developers can also integrate the payment vault into their own AI applications through its software development kit. Coinbase's x402 gains AI payments traction PayBox also supports x402, an open payment protocol originally developed by Coinbase that enables AI agents to make internet-native payments. Contributed to the Linux Foundation in April 2026, the protocol is now governed as an open, vendor-neutral industry standard. Coinbase has continued expanding the x402 ecosystem this year. In June, the crypto exchange launched tools that let AI agents accept USDC payments, trade crypto, discover paid services through an AI marketplace and process high-frequency micropayments more efficiently. Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services integrated x402 into its Bedrock AgentCore Payments service, while Fireblocks launched an x402-compatible payments framework for AI agents and joined the x402 Foundation. Network activity appears to be growing alongside adoption. In a June 3 report, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said agentic payments on Coinbase's Base network surpassed 100 million transactions within roughly nine months, highlighting growing activity around the protocol even as early usage was driven in part by speculative applications. At the time of writing, the protocol's public dashboard shows more than 12.7 million transactions over the past 30 days across participating services. x402scan (past 30-day ecosystem statistics). Source: x402scan.com