MoonPay is not slowing down. The crypto payments giant announced Monday the acquisition of Dawn Labs, an applied AI research startup focused on autonomous trading tools for digital asset markets. Alongside the deal, the company launched Dawn CLI, a product that lets users build and execute trading strategies using plain-English prompts. No coding background required.

 

The move pushes MoonPay deeper into what it calls the "agentic" layer of crypto, where AI systems can reason, plan, and now, apparently, trade on your behalf. It also adds another chapter to the company's broader infrastructure buildout, which has been accelerating through 2025 and into this year.

 

Plain English, Real Trades

Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad, who now serves as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, put it bluntly: until now, building a systematic trading strategy meant being a developer, a quantitative analyst, and a portfolio manager all at once. Dawn CLI collapses all of that into a single interface. You describe what you want, the system writes the code, and then it runs.

 

The platform is launching first on Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market that has seen explosive growth over the past two years, attracting traders betting on elections, sports results, economic data, and geopolitical events. Prediction markets have gone from a niche crypto experiment to a mainstream information layer, and tools to actually trade them systematically have lagged badly behind the demand. That's the gap MoonPay is targeting.

 

"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. Additional trading venues and asset types are on the roadmap for the coming months.

 

Infrastructure First Model

The Dawn Labs deal sits within a larger strategic context. Earlier this year, in February, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer built on its developer-focused command-line interface that lets AI agents access crypto wallets, execute trades, perform cross-chain swaps, and off-ramp back to fiat, all autonomously. CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright described the thinking in stark terms: "AI agents can reason, but they cannot act economically without capital infrastructure. MoonPay is the bridge between AI and money."

 

The service works through a one-time KYC process, after which an agent can transact on behalf of the verified user within preset permissions. Wallets are non-custodial and stored on the user's device, not held by MoonPay. It also supports the x402 standard, a machine-to-machine payments protocol that has been gaining traction across the industry, with Stripe and Cloudflare both adding support in recent months.

 

A Broader Industry Shift

MoonPay is not alone in this push. Gemini launched its own agentic trading feature for AI agents back in April, and Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon have each rolled out AI-compatible stablecoin payment rails in recent months. Solana and Google have made similar moves. The pattern is clear enough: major players across crypto and fintech are racing to build the financial plumbing that AI agents will need to operate as independent economic actors.

 

For MoonPay specifically, it sees this as a natural extension of what it already does. The company, founded in 2019, serves more than 500 enterprise clients and 30 million users globally. Its core business has always been connecting fiat payment systems to blockchains. Extending that to AI systems is, in some ways, the logical next step.

 

Prasad said the company does not view AI agents and human traders as separate customer bases. "We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend," he explained. "Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of both humans and machines."

 

What Comes Next

Following the Agents launch in February, MoonPay unveiled a Ledger integration in March, allowing AI-initiated transactions to be signed on a hardware device, a notable security step for users wary of handing autonomous control to software alone. The Dawn CLI launch now adds an execution layer on top of that infrastructure, specifically aimed at traders who want strategy-building capabilities without the technical overhead.

 

Whether retail traders will warm to the idea of an AI agent placing bets on Polymarket on their behalf remains to be seen. But MoonPay is clearly positioning itself well ahead of that question. If the agentic economy arrives on the timeline its backers expect, the company wants to be the rails it runs on.