MoonPay has launched the Open Wallet Standard (OWS), an open-source specification that enables AI agents to securely interact with crypto wallets across different blockchains.
The OWS addresses a gap in the agentic payments stack by providing a universal, non-custodial way for AI agents to hold funds and sign transactions. This is particularly relevant as the infrastructure for agentic payments is rapidly developing, yet remains fragmented across competing protocols.
According to MoonPay, current systems share a common assumption that the agent already has a wallet, but none define where the wallet lives, how keys are stored, or how one agent discovers a wallet created by another. The OWS seeks to fill this gap with its seven sub-specifications covering storage, signing, policies, agent access, key isolation, wallet lifecycle, and supported chains.
The standard's core design principle is zero key exposure, where keys are encrypted and decrypted only to produce a signature, held in protected memory that cannot be swapped to disk, and wiped immediately after signing. The private key is never accessible to the agent, the LLM context, or any parent application.