Moonpay revealed it acquired Dawn Labs on Monday and launched Dawn CLI, an artificial intelligence (AI)-native trading tool that converts plain English strategy descriptions into autonomous trade execution on supported venues.
Key Takeaways:
- Moonpay acquired Dawn Labs on May 11, 2026, adding founder Neeraj Prasad as Chief Engineer of Moonpay Labs.
- Dawn CLI automates the full trading lifecycle, targeting fragmented infrastructure on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi.
- Moonpay now serves 30 million customers across 180 countries as it pushes deeper into AI-native financial infrastructure.
Moonpay Buys Dawn Labs and Pushes AI Trading Agent Dawn CLI Into Live Crypto Markets
Prediction markets have grown into one of the fastest-expanding categories in crypto, drawing active traders to platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Those traders rely on social media signals, automated strategies, and cross-platform positioning. The infrastructure needed to compete, however, has remained fragmented, manual, and technically demanding.
Building a trading strategy has traditionally required skills across research, software development, and portfolio management. Dawn CLI is designed to close that gap. A user describes a strategy in plain English, and the system converts it into executable code, runs automated research and simulation, and executes trades autonomously on supported venues.
Dawn Labs was founded in 2025 by Neeraj Prasad, a computer science and engineering graduate of MIT who conducted machine learning research in the university’s neuroscience labs. Before starting Dawn Labs, Prasad held engineering roles at Waymo, Microsoft, Citadel, and Reservoir Labs, working across perception systems, machine learning infrastructure, quantitative trading, and deep learning compilers.
The acquisition brings Prasad and the full Dawn team into Moonpay. He will serve as Chief Engineer of Moonpay Labs.
Dawn CLI manages the full trading lifecycle across four stages. Users describe a strategy in plain English. The platform then surfaces relevant data and market signals for evaluation. From there, trading strategy code is generated and stress-tested automatically. Trades are then executed continuously based on user direction.
“The team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea,” said Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and Founder of Moonpay. “With Dawn, traders can direct AI agents to develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies autonomously.”
Prasad described the problem Dawn was built to solve. “Competing effectively has required expertise across multiple disciplines at once,” he said. “Dawn brings those capabilities into a single autonomous system. Joining Moonpay allows us to scale that system to a broader audience.”
Moonpay has been building toward AI-native financial infrastructure over the past year. That progression moved from on-ramp APIs to Moonpay CLI, then to Moonpay Agents with Ledger-secured hardware signing, and then to Moon Agents Card, a virtual Mastercard debit card that allows users and AI agents to spend stablecoins directly from onchain balances anywhere Mastercard is accepted online.
The company also launched the Open Wallet Standard, extending that infrastructure across agents, frameworks, and chains. Moonpay positions Dawn CLI as the next step in that progression.
The Dawn CLI launch follows a period of active product development at MoonPay as the company works to give AI agents more direct, programmable access to financial systems. Whether Dawn CLI draws meaningful adoption from active traders across Polymarket, Kalshi, and other venues will depend on how well the system handles strategy execution in live market conditions.