AI agents are becoming economic participants. They manage tasks, make decisions, and increasingly need to transact on-chain. However, the wallet infrastructure to support this has not kept pace.
Each AI agent framework builds its own wallet system. The result is fragmentation: agent funds scatter across incompatible interfaces with no shared standard. Additionally, most implementations store private keys insecurely. Keys end up hardcoded in environment variables, configuration files, or function arguments. These keys can surface in log files, crash reports, or within language model context windows, creating real exposure risks.
MoonPay identified this gap while building its own AI agent infrastructure. The company concluded the problem extended well beyond its own product. Rather, the entire agent economy lacked a shared wallet standard. So MoonPay built one and released it as open-source.
You don’t need regulations to unlock the agentic economy. You need standards 🚀
— Caroline D. Pham (@CarolineDPham) March 23, 2026
Proud of @moonpay team and our 20+ partners for launching @OpenWallet Standard!
✅ Open
✅ Secure
✅ Local
ONWARD AND UPWARD 💜🤖 https://t.co/qV8hVSov1z
Introducing OWS
On March 23, 2026, MoonPay launched the Open Wallet Standard (OWS). OWS is an open-source, MIT-licensed framework built specifically for AI agents. It gives agents a consistent, secure interface for holding funds, signing transactions, and paying across blockchains. MoonPay published OWS on GitHub, npm, and PyPI for immediate integration.
OWS covers seven modular sub-specifications. These span storage, signing, policies, agent access, key isolation, lifecycle management, and supported chains. One seed phrase derives accounts across eight chain families: EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos, Tron, TON, Spark, and Filecoin. Practically, agents can transact on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Solana, Bitcoin, and many other networks. No separate wallet is needed for each chain.
MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright summarized the intent directly. “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.”
How the Security Model Works
Security is the central design challenge for any autonomous agent wallet. OWS uses a local-first, isolated key management model. Private keys live in an encrypted vault stored at ~/.ows/ on the agent’s local machine. No keys are stored in the cloud, and no vendor holds access.
When an agent needs to sign a transaction, it calls a function that OWS handles internally. OWS decrypts the key using AES-256-GCM encryption, produces the signature, and immediately wipes the key from memory. As a result, private keys never appear in agent-facing code, never enter LLM context, and remain unlogged. A policy engine adds another control layer before any key is accessed. It enforces spending limits, contract allowlists, and authorization rules on every signing request.
OWS is accessible via CLI, MCP server, SDK, and REST API. The standard integrates with x402, a protocol for structured payment requests. MPP, a micropayment protocol, supports streaming transactions as well. OWS also includes Ledger hardware signing support, making it the first agent-focused wallet with hardware-backed transaction approval.
MoonPay acknowledged one limitation in the current release. The specification states that compromised process memory is “not fully mitigated in the current in-process model.” However, the design significantly reduces the attack surface compared to existing common practices.
A Coalition of Major Backers
OWS launched with support from over 15 organizations spanning payments, blockchain infrastructure, and developer tooling. PayPal, Circle, and Ripple represent the payments and stablecoin infrastructure side. The Ethereum Foundation, Solana Foundation, TON Foundation, and Filecoin Foundation are among the blockchain ecosystem contributors. Networks including OKX, Tron, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Sui also support the standard. Developer tool providers including LayerZero, Dynamic, Virtuals, Dflow, and Uniblock complete the coalition.
The breadth of support is significant. These organizations span competing blockchain ecosystems and payment networks. Yet they are aligning behind a single open standard. This signals that wallet fragmentation is a shared problem across the industry, not a concern limited to any one company.
Use Cases in the Agent Economy
OWS is built for scenarios that are growing more common as AI adoption expands. An AI agent might receive an x402 payment request for compute credits, a data API call, or a streaming service. The OWS policy engine checks the request against the agent’s spending limits. It then signs the transaction in an isolated process and returns authorization, without exposing the key at any point. For streaming micropayments, agents use MPP to sign payments as they accrue, within pre-authorized bounds.
Cross-chain use cases are fully supported. An agent could hold stablecoins on Ethereum and pay a service on Solana through one consistent interface. As of Q1 2026, over 340,000 on-chain wallets are already held by AI agents. That figure signals the demand for this type of infrastructure is already real. MoonPay also introduced a skills marketplace alongside OWS. This open platform lets developers publish plugins including signing modules, compliance adapters, and chain-specific extensions, expanding OWS capabilities beyond what MoonPay ships natively.
What This Means for the Market
OWS builds directly on MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer the company launched in February 2026. That product gave AI agents access to wallets and funds via MoonPay’s own infrastructure. OWS generalizes that work into an open standard that any developer or agent framework can adopt.
The AI-crypto sector was valued at roughly $5.1 billion in 2025. Projections point toward $55.2 billion by 2035. Some research suggests AI agents could account for 30% of all crypto transactions within that timeframe. Establishing the MoonPay Open Wallet Standard now positions one interface to absorb a significant share of that activity. Whether OWS becomes the industry default depends on adoption from developers and agent framework builders. The coalition behind its launch is a meaningful signal, but open standards succeed or fail through real-world uptake.
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