A Crowded Race And Blunt Verdict
He is entering a lane that has filled up fast. Visa and Mastercard have both shipped protocols for agent-initiated payments, and Cloudflare gave AI agents wallets tied to verified identities in August. Soto-Wright’s verdict on the field so far is blunt. “There was a lot of talk around things like agentic commerce. And a lot of it has fallen flat on its face. A lot of it is kind of a lot of noise without a lot of substance to back it up,” he said.
Others describe the same gap between announcements and habits. Nitya Subramanian, founder of agent-wallet start-up Para, said on the On The Margin podcast that “people are starting to trust agents to make purchases, but there need to be guardrails.” Users will hand an agent a weekly spending allowance, she said, “but people are not yet at the point where we’re trusting agents with full access to the bank account.”
That caution is what PayBox’s passkey ritual is designed to answer. Every approval is scoped to a single action and expires after use, and users choose between an ‘Always Ask’ mode and an autonomous one governed by policies they set. The trust question extends past the technology, though.
Chandler Fang, founder of trust-layer startup t54 Labs, said on the On The Margin podcast that the ordinary future looks like telling an agent, “This is my parents’ birthday. Make sure to buy a birthday gift every year under $200.” The catch, he added, is that “you are delegating your agents, which implicitly you are trusting your agents to get involved in your daily financials, to touch your money, to move money around.” His company, backed by Ripple and Franklin Templeton, builds exactly the kind of verification plumbing for x402 payments that a world of shopping agents would lean on.
Three Acquisitions Built the Vault
PayBox is the product of a buying spree. Its architect, Neeraj Prasad, was building AI trading agents for Polymarket at Dawn Labs when MoonPay acquired his startup and made him chief engineer of MoonPay Labs. The key-splitting security comes from Sodot, the Israeli cryptography firm MoonPay bought in April in a stock deal CoinDesk put at $100 million, and the trading rails come from DFlow, the Solana execution layer it acquired in May for a price Fortune reported at another $100 million in stock. The company has been assembling pieces like this since at least 2025, when it picked up the stablecoin infrastructure firm Iron. The bet has attracted expensive believers: Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has been in talks to invest at a valuation near $5 billion, Bloomberg reported in December.
Soto-Wright frames the product as the answer to a question he thinks the AI industry has not settled. “I would say superintelligence right now is in read-only mode,” he said. Chatbots can research a purchase, draft the email, and compare the yields, and then hand the human a to-do list.
Letting them finish the job is the part that unsettles people, and Soto-Wright is unbothered by the discomfort. Agents do not sleep, he argues, and they check rates humans never get around to checking. “I think an agent’s going to do a better job than a human at being able to rebalance my portfolio, and take advantage of the best yield that I could possibly get across those different protocols,” he said.
forbes.com
