MoonPay says it has made a big advance in the nascent field of using AI agents for consumer purchases. On Thursday, the payments company unveiled PayBox, a new wallet tool that users can plug into their Claude or ChatGPT screens, and that is capable of carrying out a wide variety of transactions that range from booking flights and restaurant reservations to shopping on Amazon. The tool will be live on July 28.
According to Neeraj Prasad, the Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, the new PayBox tool supplies a critical final tool when it comes to shopping with popular AI agents. Non-technical consumers, he says, have so far been able to instruct their agents to explore purchase options and fetch prices, but not pull the trigger and actually buy something.
In its announcement, MoonPay described PayBox as “closing that last step for everyone” and noted that the tool doesn’t require users to write code or install a special program. Instead, in the case of Claude, users simply search for PayBox in the Connectors menu of the agent’s settings tab. Once the user adds PayBox, they can provide the wallet with funds from a bank account or with cryptocurrency.
The upshot is that a user’s Claude or ChatGPT agent is effectively carrying a purse of money. This means the user can tell the agent in plain English to go out and make a purchase at any merchant, provided the merchant has added the capacity to interact with agents. In the case of booking a table, PayBox users can pay Resy to hold reservations and, for flights, users can tell their agent to use an agent-friendly service called Brij.
PayBox also permits users to set guardrails on what the wallet can do. For instance, users can limit it to purchases under $100 or require PayBox to notify them before making any purchase.
The PayBox wallet service is not entirely novel. Currently, platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase offer tools to allow users to provide agents with funds for shopping. The MoonPay offering, however, is distinct in that is decentralized and does not depend on the company’s permissions to carry out a given transaction. This means the wallet, which relies on the open protocol known as x402, can be used by anyone and will not favor any particular merchant over another.
PayBox is an intriguing new addition to the emerging world of agentic commerce, which is growing fast but still accounts for only a tiny percentage of overall online commerce. But it could face a challenge when it comes to adoption since MoonPay is known primarily as a backend payment that is unfamiliar to most consumers. Meanwhile, brands like Robinhood and Visa—which is also building AI commerce tools of its—can turn to a large base of existing customers to build out their offerings.
It’s also unclear how PayBox will respond to mistaken or fraudulent purchases—issues that the broader agentic commerce sector is also navigating.
MoonPay’s Prasad, for his part, says that PayBox will catch on thanks to its decentralized design that makes it easy for anyone to use.
“The giants are building agentic payments inside their own walls; we’re the opposite bet: your own money, on open rails, reaching everything the walled versions can’t, from a dinner reservation to a DeFi protocol. Nobody signed up for Venmo because of ACH. People won’t come to PayBox for the wallet; they’ll come because their AI can finally finish the job,” said Prasad by email.