MoonPay is expanding its presence in AI-driven cryptocurrency infrastructure through the acquisition of Dawn Labs, a startup building autonomous trading tools for prediction markets and digital asset traders.
This crypto payment company announced on Monday that it has acquired the Applied Research Lab and launched Dawn CLI, an AI-powered trading product designed to enable users to build and execute trading strategies through natural language prompts. (Disclosure: MoonPay Ventures is the parent company of Dastan’s investor, an editorially independent media outlet Decrypt.)
“Before this, building and running systematic trading strategies required you to wear the hats of a developer, quantitative analyst, and portfolio manager simultaneously,” says Neeraj Prasad, founder of Dawn Labs and chief engineer at MoonPay Labs. Decrypt “Dawn brings all these functions together into a single unified interface. You simply describe your needs in simple English, and the system handles the coding and execution.”
This release comes at a time when prediction market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi are thriving, attracting numerous traders to bet on elections, sporting events, economic indicators, and geopolitical events. The growth of these markets has also increased demand for tools capable of analyzing information, automating trades, and responding rapidly across platforms.
Prasad said: "We started with prediction markets because it is one of the fastest-growing industries, and many traders in this space are not adequately served by existing tools."
Prasad said the platform will initially support Polymarket and plans to expand to other marketplaces and asset types in the coming months.
This move reflects the growing momentum in the cryptocurrency and fintech sectors to build AI agents capable of directly interacting with financial systems. In April, the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini launched its agent trading feature, AI agents; meanwhile, Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon have recently rolled out services as well, including AI stablecoin payment rails, and Solana and Google have done similar things.
Although artificial intelligence has increasingly become part of the cryptocurrency landscape, Prasad said MoonPay does not view AI agents and human users as distinct customer groups: the technology is designed to serve all types of traders.
“We built MoonPay around four pillars: fundraising, tokenization, trading, and spending,” he said. “Our agent products apply the same architecture to AI agents. Each product makes it easier for humans and agents to transfer value. Dawn is the latest example: humans set the strategy, agents execute.”
The rise of autonomous trading agents has raised concerns about fake strategies, unintended trades, and execution failures, especially as AI systems begin to evolve. Handling real capital.
Prasad said that Dawn addresses these risks by creating non-custodial wallets locally through open wallet standards, which involve auditable strategy code that users can review before deployment, along with policy controls that limit how much agents can trade, which markets they can access, and the size of their positions.
Meanwhile, MoonPay is also further advancing its artificial intelligence infrastructure. Over the past few months, the company has launched an open-source wallet standard for AI agents, introduced a stablecoin debit card for autonomous AI models, and acquired Sodot, a crypto key management company, as part of its broader institutional expansion.
Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay, stated in a press release: "The Dawn Labs team makes it easy for anyone with an idea to take control of the most complex aspects of active trading. With Dawn, AI agents can autonomously develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies. This is exactly what the next phase of MoonPay’s evolution is all about."