MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launches Natural-Language AI Trading Tool

MoonPay, a crypto payments company, has acquired AI trading startup Dawn Labs and launched Dawn CLI, a natural-language tool for building automated trading strategies.

Decrypt reported on May 11 that MoonPay unveiled the AI-native trading product alongside the acquisition. The service lets users describe a trading strategy in plain English, then converts the instructions into code and executes them automatically.

“Until now, building systematic trading strategies meant acting as a developer, quant and portfolio manager all at once,” said Neeraj Prasad, founder of Dawn Labs and now a principal engineer at MoonPay Labs. Dawn combines those functions in a single interface, he added, allowing users to describe a strategy in English while the system writes and runs the code.

Dawn CLI is launching first with prediction-market platform Polymarket. MoonPay plans to expand support to other exchanges and asset classes.

Prediction-market platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi have grown rapidly, with markets tied to elections, sports, economic indicators and geopolitical events. That growth has driven demand for AI-based tools that can analyze information, automate trading and work across multiple platforms.

MoonPay said it does not distinguish between AI agents and human users. In this setup, humans define the strategy and AI agents execute it. Prasad said the broader AI-agent product suite is an extension of infrastructure designed to make it easier for both people and agents to move value.

The rise of AI-driven automated trading has also sparked concerns about hallucinated strategies, unintended orders and execution errors. MoonPay said it manages those risks through locally generated non-custodial wallets based on the Open Wallet Standard, user-reviewable strategy code, and policy controls that limit trading size and market access.

“Dawn has made complex active trading accessible to anyone,” MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said. He said MoonPay’s next step is enabling AI agents to autonomously develop and execute sophisticated strategies.

MoonPay has recently expanded its AI-focused infrastructure efforts by releasing an open-source wallet standard for AI agents, launching a stablecoin-based virtual debit card and acquiring crypto key-management company Sodot.