PayBox Explained: MoonPay's On-Ramps, Swaps and Virtual Accounts Inside Claude, ChatGPT and Grok

Watching the Modern Money Show, Stable Ash live. We are live here with Halsey. MoonPay's in the building. We love MoonPay. Halsey, good to see you, man. Thanks for joining. Yeah.

Thank you for having me. I I gotta say before we jump in, I am highly impressed with the green screen behind the stage setup. Had a great time riffing with Andre. It's awesome to see, like, the the show just, you know, blow up on the side as well. Right? Thank you so much. Oven's in the fire. I will I will try and fire. Some other side ovens in the fire for you to see the call. We Well, think we're disappointing something here. That is

is impressive. Like, I'm like I forgot that MoonPay was even been around for seven years, to be honest. Bring us into the journey. You go from business development. You just climb in the ranks. Like, what what do you even do now? Ecosystems, strategic partnerships, ventures. It seems like you probably get to have your your oven your oven's in a lot of fires. Yes. So yeah. What what what what are you working on? How has your time at MoonPay evolved?

And I'm sure we'll get into Paybox, but how did we even get to Paybox?

Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, the, kinda growth through it makes makes a a lot of sense. So I like to tell people I'm like the wearer of many hats. Right? So I started off, call it early, BD, customer support, finance, ops, really what we needed to get done, scaling MoonPay from, you know, zero to one. Right? And, Drew, to your point, I think one of the reasons, like, I have stayed here so long is because MoonPay keeps expanding. The partners that we work with, what we're working on as well, that continues to compound.

Right? And I continue to move into probably what some of the more, bleeding edge sides of the the squad are. Right? We've had a very public, run on the kinda corp dev and m and a side. Right? So, anytime we bring in some of those groups, I like to parachute in, is there, employee number one again? So just this year, I've been spending a a ton of time with the different squads building out AI products, over at MoonPay.

And so you've definitely seen a lot of noise coming from our side for Paybox, which is now live in everyone's favorite AI interface across, you know, Claude, ChatGPT, and just this week, Grok. So it's been really, really exciting, kind of building out this brand new interface for people.

You know, the world is Pulling this up, we we created this, gosh, maybe a month maybe over a month missing or something. You're missing entendre. We're missing our I know. I know. It's just a little outdated, but it's at least like a an attempt.

We honestly we we we loved it when we saw it because, like, it it you know, sometimes we do need to take a step back and show everyone what kind of the, playing field looks like from that side. But to to bring us to Paybox now, it's actually great having this this slide up here. Right? All of these different products, that MoonPay has either kinda built in house or or brought to market. Right?

We have had to find what is the agentic version of these services, right, if we think everyone is going to be, you know, maybe not just working with one AI agent, but managing a fleet of them, a lot more of this commerce is gonna happen from these agents versus individual users. How do we make sure that we have the product set that is going to be fit for this, you know, new paradigm that we have?

And that has been very, very interesting, kinda taking each of those products and kinda building out the unique version of it. But it was really with kinda the acquisition of Sodot that we were able to build this, like, very unique kinda non custodial cloud secure vault architecture that actually enables a lot of the magic that Paybox has inside. So it may seem like we're doing a whole lot on this continual m and a scheme, but you can see all of it actually living together in this unit on the Paybox front.

And that is gonna turn into like a much larger know, we like to think of it almost like an operating system, in and of itself. Right? We're enabling a lot of users to do things that they could never do before inside of their favorite chat environment. Right? You didn't need to get a PhD in in building out your own agent harness to go and and get a lot of this functionality to work.

And just over the past few weeks, we've taken a number of, call it, MoonPay's more kind of classical clients, like groups that we've worked with for a number of years and bringing their favorite functionality from their, like, apps and ecosystem directly into this very kind of consumer heavy agent front end. So a lot of magical experiences for people, a lot of that they could not do before we launched Paybox, and a lot of moments that that we're seeing, just from people kinda using it, on the day to day.

Okay. Was gonna say, we actually have to book our travel to Solana Breakpoint, and I'm like, maybe I should do this with pay with Payless. Would be good. I I was having Rockbot do all the research already, and I was trying to figure out, like, what is what is that last leg of, you know, payments, the booking, the because that's the hard part. It can kinda, like, guess prices out of the box, you know, just looking on Google, but it it it has a really hard time, like, what is it actually gonna cost?

Are the dates actually available? And then, of course, the last kind of the last leg of of Agenci Commerce is can you actually pay for it? Bring us back, though. Like, why Grok? Like, why does this actually matter so much? Grok feels like it's kind of having its moment in the AI conversation, especially with the launch of Grok Bot. How do you kind of think about is this more like you wanna be, you know, unbiased, give people the tools that they need, take it where they wanna use it?

Are you leaning down the like, maybe personally, do you lean down the route of using CloudShashBT Grok over another? Help us understand more the impact of, like, you know, why why Paybox and Grok specifically.

Yeah. Yeah. And, disclaimer for my security team watching this, I have to try all harnesses and systems, but I'm not doing it on company machines. That's So for for us, Grok is especially important kinda this week as well. Right? Across Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, you have, like, the three most popular agentic surfaces. Right? Largest user base where people are actively interacting with these agents. And to your point earlier, like, could do some research on finding those flights.

You could get fairly far in that process, but you couldn't actually execute something, kinda in the real world. Right? So just picking these three kinda surfaces, if we can get Paybox to unlock a lot of these new experiences for these interfaces, All of the other harnesses and popular interfaces that get built after that, Moon or sorry, Paybox has effectively built out that standard that can work with any other feature chat interface. So we definitely pick these three because they are the most popular. Right?

So always actively looking for feedback. And this definitely gives us a a very good user base for that. What's been very interesting for for us as well is we found that some of the kinda crypto user base that may use MoonPay for any number of reasons, Us launching Paybox and telling them, hey, you can go do more of this functionality over here, actually got them to start using Claude and Chatchi BT. It wasn't necessarily the other way around. But this is a starting point. Right?

If we can get it to work in these environments, we know that's going to be a kind of popular form function for everyone else downstream who wants to launch their own agent products, chat products. And, you know, the MoonPay services that everyone knows and loves, right, the the on ramps, the off ramps, the virtual accounts, the swaps, all of that is natively inside of Paybox.

So the future harnesses, other a groups that we work with, like, all of this is going to come basically out of the box inside of Paybox and fit in the same way.

Is is this kind of how you it's interesting because the the tenure you've had at the company, like, Paybox seems to be uniquely possible, and there's a really interesting right to win here that MoonPay has with a product like this because you've either built or bought so much of the underlying tech that is really needed to be felt frictionless, like under the hood here.

Maybe speak to a little bit of the unique pieces to this puzzle that are happening behind Paybox that, yeah, you've either bought or built that that actually allow MoonPay to be at a unique position to offer something like this. Would love to see how you how you think about that.

And also, like, you mentioned being zero to one in some of these pieces of of the MoonPay suite, and I would love to dive a little bit more into like that how you make zero to one successful after that, but maybe we start with like, what is actually behind Paybox under the hood? Yeah. So,

big shout out, to the to the team over at, SODOT. Their key management architecture is very core to enabling a lot of this functionality to to keep this

but it's going to allow for that to go and get used. We could not build this or or make this possible without all of these pieces being in house. Right? So without getting, too knee deep on the the weeds on that side, the kinda, key management architecture that unlocks like this non custodial is the the base of what makes a lot of this possible.

And MoonPay just being this kind of global financial institution with, you know, that we know that they are real verified humans when they're coming through to go and use this effective network that we built.

We just have, the ability to you know, if you wanna minimize it down to to to bot management or or, like, anti fraud prevention, right, we can make sure that everyone who's actually, like, using these services, products, APIs, etcetera, like, are actually true kind of verified MoonPay users, which when you're looking at just, like, strictly on chain metrics and things like that, you you don't always have the ability to get down to that kind of granular level of detail.

So as we see this, expanding, like, agent network evolving, right, there are more merchants who are gonna be moving their services to go and get consumed by, agentic APIs. Right? And those merchants or those other providers, like, they wanna know on the other side that, there is some kind of control that, like, there is a real verified person behind the usage of this agent.

And it's been very interesting kinda, listening to feedback from some of these, call it more web two groups who they were interested in the agent side of this. But it was only until, like, the advent of x four zero two that they realized that crypto is actually a better way for them to go and and service this, like, agentic side of their APIs. So it's been very interesting having this kind of KYC layer to this almost like KYB vendor layer and having Paybox be this network layer that, lives in the middle of it.

Ozzy, I'm looking through the Paybox x timeline right now. It seems to be really dominated with with trading activity, activity on Camino. There's a recent Jupiter launch. Personally, even as somebody who's been in this space for a while, I've yet to, like, make that leap, start trading with with the agent. How how do you think about this this paradigm? Like and I think what I'm asking is, does it start with trading? Does it start with the the small things? Right? Buy a little bit Solana here.

Don't sell it until it's $200. Set up a DCA. Then it's kind of like the follow these podcasts. Yeah. Trade the news. And then and then is is that like, then from there, we can actually go to a gen to commerce because now your money's in the agent. You maybe you sell off a position. You wanna take a trip. I almost think about it, like, it's in the same way as, like, how neobanks kind of got their got their craze. It was like, well, first, need to get money into crypto.

Once I make some money, then it's like what I need to do with it. It's not just like, let me just put a thousand dollars in my wallet and, you know, go use the stablecoin card. It's like, there there seems to be, like, an evolution. How did you kinda see that evolution playing out maybe with Paybox? And then even as you're thinking about, like, what tooling do they need? Because even if you look at this this spread right here, it's majority trading activity and earned, but then, you know, you there's still dining.

There's still travel.

How do you think the user experience will evolve with this? Yeah. So you're you're thinking about it exactly the right way. Right? People are learning a new way of operating. Right? So when we launched Paybox for a lot of these users, it may have been the first time that they were doing agentic trading. It may have been the first time they asked Clot or Chad GPT anything about crypto on that side. Every individual is also going to start using their agents in a slightly different way. Right?

So one of our product leads, like, he may be very heavy into using his agent to go and do, like, research every morning to to make sure he's 's got, you know, some kind of view over, you know, x ecosystem, and he may use it heavily for training. Right? When you figure out, like, your daily driver, sometimes people will call it, like, the agent, the workflow that actually works for you on a regular basis, that becomes, like, a very sticky product for you.

Paybox itself being, pretty, like, ubiquitous layer, there's a lot that you can do with it. And so a lot of the launches that you're seeing us do are very specific to, hey, this is a brand that you know, you've probably used them before. There's a functionality that they power that you may have done in the past, but now there's a new way of doing it. New way of accessing it that was easier for you inside of something else that you know.

And getting people to go try that in that new interface might be a little scary at times, which is also very helpful why MoonPay is a licensed provider and people can know that there's like a trust and security like behind the brand itself. But there's definitely a little surprise and delight for people that are accustomed to like ripping trades on the terminal, but then they just set up their own, like, DCA strategy just through Claude, they're like, oh my god. It worked. Like, this is insane.

Like, I can just do this now. This is great. I'm now gonna move a few things over here, and I don't have to go look at a whole bunch of terminal screens. So everyone, definitely takes a little bit of, like, wading into the water. Right? Yeah. But once you kinda, get that surprise and delight moment of figuring out, hey. I was able to actually go book this reservation and, like, oh, it actually ran off of x $40.02 in USDC, but I didn't actually really have to worry about that.

I can just go to Carbone later this evening. It's like a very cool experience to watch live.

I saw that people can fund sorry, Drew. Last one for me. I saw that people can fund Paybox with Cash App. I think one of the the sticky layers, right, is can you get payroll can you get somebody to have an automatic deposit from payroll directly into whatever that app is, whether it's your bank, whether it's your neobank, whether it's your trading experiences. Can people do that with Paybox right now to where it's, you know, is there a virtual account tied to a wallet? Is there can they kinda hack it right now?

Is there an easy way that somebody could say, hey. I want 5% to go into my wall my agent that's set up with Paybox execute my, you know, Solana and Joob DCAs and to put 10% of it into, maybe a loop scale vault or an Aave, you know, Aave position.

Yeah. So, at the end of the day, your your Paybox wallet is, you know, noncustodial wallet. So if you want to go use that, let's say you you work for a company, they use deal, to manage their payroll, right, through, something we help power them on our, MoonPay enterprise side, you can go and get part of your payroll to to go out. So if you chose your Paybox wallet to be that kind of output wallet where you wanted to go and get your your payroll out, that can definitely happen today.

Without dropping too much alpha, there are a number of partners, kind of inside the larger MoonPay ecosystem that we are looking to to bring them a little bit deeper into the Paybox ecosystem. But to your second point, is there a way to kinda get this done today? Like, yes, there is.

Okay. So It's easy. I can take that answer. Yeah. Yeah. Go going back a little bit to mainly you know, we're in this we're we're in this zero to one moment with a lot of this. And you you mentioned that your role both on the, like, venture side, but also post acquisition is to come into these early products and maybe post acquisition teams and help them really find where this tech fits into the broader company, how to continue to commercialize the tech.

What have you found I feel like we're in in now we're just in this really interesting moment as an industry where I think a lot of companies are building very, very interesting products that have to do with the intersection of money and AI.

What is what is either, like, your experience internally right now in order to get as much PMF or or shots on goal with with this, and what advice would you give to builders across the stack right now who are trying to really find their footing in the industry of accelerating what's possible and actually getting some of what's getting built used? I feel like we're not there yet in a macro sense. What would be your advice or perspective?

Yeah. I will say curiosity is probably the most helpful thing for everyone that cares about tinkering in our space right now. There is so much that we've been able to accomplish just through this year on a, call it, collaborative nature. Right? I have so many discovery sessions. Right? I talk with anybody who, will listen to to talk about agentic commerce and where they think that space is moving forward. So there's a lot of experimentation going on, and there's a lot of, hey, I saw what you launched the other week.

We think that's really interesting. We have these three other pieces over here. Do you think we can make something happen? And, you know, a lot of them may be kind of proof of concepts, but it's happening very quickly. And a lot of the groups that you're speaking with, like, they may be running their own fleet of agents to go put the idea that you just discussed together, like, together while you're on the call. So this, like, speed of experimentation is getting faster.

The people that are willing to kinda dig in and maybe take risk is not the the right word, but you're not spending so much time to wait for perfection. Right? Maybe it's something that's just gonna be for a smaller base, but you can at least get some feedback and and see if that's directionally right. That's where we're seeing groups get success on this side.

But we you know, crypto being the kind of open collaborative nature as well, it's really, really cool to see open source software and open source infrastructure also continue to get a lot of wins on this side. Yeah. Not to not to knock any, closed loop AI things on that front, but, being open, being yeah. Open APIs and having some set of your product that can also be open for experimentation even if it's not the main thing, that is definitely very helpful.

And then also everyone now needs to be thoughtful of if we're going to launch something, How is an agent going to be able to use it? So I think with those two pieces, be curious and be agent ready.

Definitely. What what sparks your curiosity right now? I think one big thing for me this week was seeing some, like, generative video AIs, like, streams where I don't know if you saw this. People could actually go onto the livestream. They could comment in the chat, and then that would start happening on the stream, and I was going back and forth with a few friends. Like, I don't know. Is this something that we integrate? Is this something I go play with on the side?

That's something for me personally that sparked my curiosity. But if yeah. Like, what's maybe a few things on the timeline in the past few weeks that you've seen that you're like, hey. This warrants a cold DM. I'm reaching out. I wanna get in touch. We've been cold DMing a lot this week. Just been like, let's just see what we can get yeah. What what what curiosity cold DMs, what does that look like? So with, with with Val and Val live, I'm a

mass well, massive fan of brick and morty. So if you're familiar with, like, international cable, watching that play out and and watching levels and and those guys put this together. We spent a lot of time with the Venice team. So as soon as they had models available that we could go put together, maybe charge on the x four zero two front, MoonPay r and d team had quite a bit of fun putting our own version of this full moon TV together on the side. Why? Because you can and it works.

But something like super magical and like watching like the Internet come together so excited like, oh my god, guys, we did it. And then for me, this can bring to the point, people being excited that, like, they didn't know that they built something that could be workable for agents or used for agents, and the only thing that was stopping them in the middle, it's also a perfect segue for your next speaker.

But x four zero two has been, like, weirdly pivotal for for a lot of groups, as being, like, the probably their only way to allow for their API to go and get, like, consumed on this side. And so I've had a a number of companies, brands reaching out being like, hey. We saw, all the excitement on the Paybox side. You know? How can we work with you? Like, what can we do to, like, go and get inside of Paybox? And for a number of them, it's actually, like, very easy. It's like, have you looked at x four zero two yet?

If you have anything that I can go and kinda wrap on this side, like, that is actually natively going to be supported inside of Paybox. So if you can go get this done over here, like, we don't even have to do anything. User will just be able to ask for it and Paybox will pull it up. So seeing that side, in a weird way, it kinda reminds me a little bit of like the initial NFT craze where you had these web two brands coming in being like, hey, what do I need to do? Web three?

But this one feels like there's much more commercial grounding. And just to being live for, you know, a number of months, we're seeing like real volume go through on that side.

Can you double click into into that? I mean, you you were at MoonPay during this moment of, like, a lot of enterprise and commercial interest for NFTs, which we have seen kind of have this massive rise and decline. Like, what seems different now when you say there's, like, commercial grounding? Like, what is that? The

so on the agent side, it was we're going to use crypto here not because it is, like, buzzword or, like, we get to do something net new, it's we're going to use crypto here because it's what unlocks what we wanted to happen inside of this like new paradigm, new space. So it's almost like we had a existing thing that was working, but in order to get it to work for this new agent entity that we have, like, you have to change what you have.

Whereas I felt like a little bit on the NFT side, it may have been let's go create something new to see if it kind of fits in this, kinda niche or vertical of web three, where this is, like, actively taking something that's been live for for many, many people. Right? People have been using APIs and SaaSers forever and Finna get into this side. So it was less of a, hey. This might be a fun thing to go and do on the marketing side to, wow. This is the only way we can get it to work. Super

cool. Well, we we are going to bring in, Kevin from x four zero two. Perfect segue. And we we are equally, yeah, encouraged by what they are doing over there and the kind of yeah. It seems like extremely complementary role that it plays for bringing utility, accelerating what's possible. Yeah. Sounds like you guys have a great relationship with that that crew. So, Halsey, what did we what did we miss?

Any any kind of final I know we didn't even touch on, like, we we've been really we've loved seeing the kind of iron evolution. It's like the MoonPay enterprise and a lot of the business use cases, and maybe we'll have you back on or someone from that side of the business to to cover that. But there's so much going on. What would be your kind of parting words for for the audience?

I've got I I promised you guys some some alpha and some ovens in the fire. There is more to come on the Grok and Grok bot side. And then, towards the end of the month, we are looking forwards to making, Paybox even more open and available to developers around the world. So definitely more excitement coming on the timeline, and we should have a few of these, announcements going through over the next few weeks. Nice. Nice.

Appreciate your time, man. Good to catch up with you. Good to see you guys. Take a great job. See you.