Key Takeaways:
Crypto payments firm MoonPay will launch its MoonAgents Card, a virtual Mastercard letting AI agents spend stablecoins directly from on-chain wallets, following a surge in its CLI usage to over 4 million tool calls. The initiative combines MoonPay's AI infrastructure with Monavate's card issuing and Mastercard's global payments network.
"Agents are already managing wallets, executing trades, and moving value onchain. The one thing they couldn't do was spend at a merchant. Now they can," said Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and Founder of MoonPay.
The card links a self-custodial wallet to a Mastercard through Monavate's infrastructure. At the point of sale, a smart contract is authorized to access the stablecoin balance, with Monavate handling the on-chain funding and card authorization in real time. Custody of the wallet is never transferred.
The initiative aims to build a financial stack for autonomous AI, which is expected to transact at machine speed across millions of merchants. It extends MoonPay's agent infrastructure, which includes its command-line interface and Ledger-secured hardware signing workflows.
The launch addresses a critical gap in the burgeoning AI agent economy. While agents can manage on-chain assets, they have lacked a bridge to traditional commerce. The MoonAgents Card provides this bridge, allowing programmatic spending directly from a user's wallet without transferring custody. "The wallets and cards that work for that future look nothing like what exists today—and we're building for that future," said JP Richardson, CEO of Exodus, a partner in the project.
This move by MoonPay mirrors a larger trend of major payment networks integrating stablecoin-based solutions to solve financial friction. Visa recently added the Polygon blockchain to its settlement program, allowing fintech issuers to settle card payments in stablecoins outside of traditional banking hours. This helps reduce the working capital costs associated with weekend settlement delays.
The underlying infrastructure for stablecoins is also maturing. Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the U.S., recently partnered with M0 to streamline the issuance of regulated stablecoins for institutions. M0's protocol is already used by payment firms like Stripe and MoonPay, showing a concerted effort to build a compliant and scalable foundation for stablecoin-based finance.
The MoonAgents Card is the latest component in MoonPay's AI-native financial stack. It builds on the MoonPay CLI, which has seen accelerating adoption, and the Open Wallet Standard, a universal framework for agents backed by the Ethereum Foundation, Solana Foundation, and PayPal. By adding a spending layer, MoonPay aims to create a comprehensive ecosystem for autonomous economic activity onchain.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
