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

The crypto payments infrastructure company MoonPay announced the acquisition of Dawn Labs, an applied research lab focused on artificial intelligence and financial markets, alongside the launch of Dawn CLI, an AI-native trading tool.

According to the official press release, the acquisition brings Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad into MoonPay as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs. Prasad previously held engineering roles at Waymo, Microsoft, Citadel, and Reservoir Labs before founding Dawn Labs in 2025.

Dawn CLI enables users to describe trading strategies in plain English, then converts those instructions into executable code, conducts automated research and backtesting, and executes trades autonomously on supported venues. The product launches first with support for prediction-market platform Polymarket, with plans to expand to additional exchanges and asset classes.

Until now, building systematic trading strategies meant acting as a developer, quant, and portfolio manager all at once. Dawn combines those functions in a single interface, allowing users to describe a strategy in English while the system writes and runs the code (a workflow that previously required terminal access and Python proficiency).

Independent reporting from Decrypt corroborates the timeline and scope of the changes. The outlet notes the launch comes as prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi see sizable growth, attracting traders betting on elections, sports, economic indicators, and geopolitical events.

The rise of AI-driven automated trading has 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.

This acquisition is the latest step in MoonPay's evolution toward AI-native infrastructure. Over the past year, the company has moved from on-ramp APIs to MoonPay CLI, MoonPay Agents with Ledger-secured hardware signing, and MoonAgents Card—a virtual Mastercard debit card that lets users and AI agents spend stablecoins directly from onchain balances.

MoonPay CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said the team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea. He added that MoonPay's next step is enabling AI agents to autonomously develop and execute sophisticated strategies.

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

Whether traders actually trust AI-generated code with real capital remains the real question. The tool may lower barriers to entry, but the market will decide if convenience outweighs the risk of automated mistakes.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn