We’re proud to announce the launch of the Open Wallet Standard, an open-source standard that gives AI agents a secure, universal way to hold value, sign transactions, and pay for services across every major blockchain, without ever exposing a private key.
This is the latest step in a deliberate shift at MoonPay toward AI-native infrastructure. Over the past year, we’ve moved from on-ramp APIs to MoonPay CLI to MoonPay Agents with Ledger-secured hardware signing – the first agent-focused wallet to support hardware-backed transaction approval. Each step has given AI agents more direct, programmable access to the financial layer. The Open Wallet Standard makes that infrastructure available to every agent, every framework, and every chain.
The standard is available today on GitHub, npm, and PyPI, with contributions from over 15 organizations spanning every layer of the industry including PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Tron, TON Foundation, Solana Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Base, Polygon, Sui, Filecoin Foundation, LayerZero, Dflow, Uniblock, Virtuals, Arbitrum, Dynamic, Allium, Simmer.Markets, and Circle.
The following is an overview of the Open Wallet Standard. For full details, read our official press release and visit openwallet.sh
From MoonPay Agents to an Open Standard
The Open Wallet Standard grew directly out of our own product development. In February, we launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer that gives AI agents access to wallets, funds, and the ability to transact autonomously via MoonPay CLI.
In building that infrastructure, we hit the same problem facing every agent framework in the space: there is no shared standard for how AI agents interact with wallets. Every framework implements its own key management. Every integration builds its own signing logic. A wallet created for one agent cannot be used by another. Private keys end up in environment variables, plaintext config files, and proprietary formats. No portability. No shared security model.
We took the wallet infrastructure behind MoonPay Agents, generalized it across chains and runtimes, and released it under an MIT open-source license. That is the Open Wallet Standard.
"The agent economy has payment rails. It didn't have a wallet standard. We built one, open-sourced it, and now the full stack exists." — Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and co-founder of MoonPay
The Missing Layer
Over the past year, the agentic payments landscape has taken shape rapidly. Coinbase and Cloudflare created x402 for HTTP-native stablecoin payments. Google launched Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with over 60 partners for agent-driven commerce. Stripe and Tempo shipped the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for session-based micropayments. The Ethereum Foundation's ERC-8004 established on-chain identity registries for trustless agents.
These protocols were built independently. Together, they form the emerging stack for the agent economy. But they all assume the same thing: that the agent already has a wallet. None defines where the wallet lives, how keys are stored, or how one agent discovers a wallet created by another.
The Open Wallet Standard is that wallet. Protocols like x402 and MPP made machine payments possible. OWS makes them usable. With the Open Wallet Standard, the full stack for the agent economy is now in place.
In practice, this means fragmentation. A user running three different tools or agents today has their funds scattered across three separate wallets that can't see each other. The same $100 in stablecoins becomes $33 in three places, with no way to access a single balance from all of them.
The Open Wallet Standard fills that gap: one encrypted vault on your machine, one interface for every chain, and a security model where the private key is never exposed to the agent, the LLM, or any parent process.
The standard is not competing with existing protocols. It makes them more valuable. Any protocol that requires a signed transaction now has a common wallet to call. Any tool or agent that supports the standard can access the same wallet with the same funds, just as multiple apps on your phone can access the same bank account.
How It Works
- Zero key exposure. AI agents operate inside LLM contexts where any data can surface in a prompt, a log, or a tool call. OWS ensures private keys are never accessible to the agent process. Keys are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM, decrypted only to produce a signature, held in protected memory that cannot be swapped to disk, and wiped immediately after.
- Every chain, one interface. A single seed phrase derives accounts across eight chain families: EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos, Tron, TON, Spark, Filecoin and XRP Ledger. One signing interface. CAIP-2 chain identifiers. A wallet created for one agent works with every protocol, every framework, and every chain.
- Policy-gated signing. Autonomous agents shouldn't have unlimited spending authority. A pre-signing policy engine evaluates every transaction before any key is touched. Spending limits, contract allowlists, chain restrictions, and time-bound authorizations are enforced at the wallet layer. The operator sets the rules. The agent operates within them.
- Agent-native access. Native SDK bindings for Node.js and Python, a CLI, and an MCP server interface. Agents built on Claude, ChatGPT, LangChain, or any MCP-compatible framework can access wallets through their native tool system.
- Local-first. The wallet vault lives on the user's machine. No cloud accounts, no remote key management, no network dependency for signing. The only network call is broadcasting a signed transaction.
In practice: an AI agent holds a balance in an OWS vault. It receives a payment request over x402 for compute credits, an API call, or a dataset. The policy engine checks the request against the agent's spending limits. The wallet decrypts the key in an isolated process, signs the transaction, wipes the key from memory, and returns the signature. The agent pays. The service delivers. The private key was never exposed to the agent, the LLM context, or any parent application. The same wallet can open an MPP session, stream payments to a different service, and settle, without changing a line of wallet logic.
Availability
- Install: curl -fsSL <https://openwallet.sh/install.sh> | bash
- Node.js SDK: npm install @open-wallet-standard/core
- Python SDK: pip install open-wallet-standard
- Specification and source: github.com/open-wallet-standard
- Website: openwallet.sh