MoonPay AI Agents Get Kamino Lending on Solana Through PayBox

What happened

MoonPay has connected Kamino, a lending protocol on Solana, to PayBox, the payment vault it built for AI assistants. Eligible users can now ask ChatGPT or Claude to lend out tokens or borrow against crypto collateral as part of a normal conversation.1 Two kinds of request are supported: supplying tokens to Kamino to earn yield, and borrowing the USDC stablecoin against collateral already deposited.1 DefiLlama data puts Kamino at roughly $1.3 billion in total value locked, with about $1 billion in loans outstanding.14

MoonPay's announcement gives examples of the prompts a user might type, such as "supply 500 USDC on Kamino" or "borrow USDC against my SOL." The assistant builds the transaction, and PayBox carries it out.8 Users pick one of two permission modes. "Always Ask" requires a passkey approval for every transaction. "Autonomous" lets the AI act on its own within limits the user sets. Access can be revoked at any time.89 CEO Ivan Soto-Wright called the integration "an important step toward making AI the interface for financial services."8

The feature is live, but not everywhere. It is unavailable in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Australia, and eligibility can also vary by asset.18

No new loan product, but a new interface

Coverage agrees on an important point: MoonPay has not built a new lending product. The integration puts a natural-language layer on top of Kamino's existing markets, replacing the protocol's usual dashboard.14 That matters because none of the underlying risk changes. Falling collateral can still push a borrower past Kamino's liquidation threshold, and liquidators can then repay the debt and take part of the collateral.5 Several outlets also point out that an AI system interpreting instructions can make mistakes when it executes them.45

One analysis put the risk well: making a leveraged action easier also makes it feel lighter than it really is. A chat prompt hides the smart-contract risk, the protocol risk and the price risk of the collateral, but all three are still there.7 This is what separates the Kamino plug-in from most agent-driven crypto activity so far. Agentic crypto use has mostly meant small, frequent payments for data, compute and online tools. Coinbase's x402 standard, for example, has handled about $50 million across 165 million payments.1 A lending instruction is a different thing. It can open a leveraged position that has to be watched for as long as it stays open.1

Reports differ on who does that watching. One write-up suggests agents could take over routine lending tasks such as tracking collateral, comparing rates and acting once conditions are met.5 MoonPay's own description is narrower. It covers preparing and executing transactions within permissions, and does not describe ongoing risk management.8 Until MoonPay says more, the sensible assumption is that the user is still the one guarding against liquidation, whatever the assistant can do when asked.

Part of a step-by-step roadmap

Kamino is not PayBox's first move into decentralized finance. When PayBox launched in late July, it already handled payments, token swaps, bridging and Aave yield.14 At launch, MoonPay Labs chief engineer Neeraj Prasad told The Block the company wanted to add swaps, perpetual futures trading and liquidity management within about a month, all under the same approval rules.25 Kamino fits that plan of broadening into DeFi one piece at a time.

The security model is what makes the lending feature plausible at all. PayBox splits wallet keys using threshold cryptography (multi-party computation) inside secure enclaves, so no single party, including MoonPay or the AI assistant, ever holds a complete private key or can sign alone.825 The technology comes from Sodot, a key-management company MoonPay bought in April 2026 for roughly $100 million, according to Decrypt as cited by Solana Compass.30 Tech Times reports that Trail of Bits and NCC Group audited the implementation before launch.22 PayBox also accepts card payments through Visa's agentic commerce protocol, and Fortune described its launch use cases as things like restaurant reservations, flights and Amazon purchases.2125

PayBox is also the consumer end of a longer push into AI agents. In February, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial layer that lets agents create wallets, fund them and transact through a command-line tool once a human has completed identity checks.1415 In March it added Ledger hardware signing, so users could approve every agent-initiated transaction on a physical device.16 The same month it released the Open Wallet Standard, an MIT-licensed specification with a policy engine that enforces spending limits and contract allowlists before any key is used. More than 15 organizations contributed, including PayPal, Circle, and the Solana and Ethereum foundations.1318 A desktop app followed in June, bundling the agent tools for people who use Claude and Codex.12

The enterprise angle

The Kamino feature is aimed at consumers, but MoonPay keeps pitching its agent stack to businesses. It says the agent infrastructure runs on systems that serve close to 500 companies and can scale to thousands of agents for trading, commerce, gaming and treasury work.146 In June it acquired Entendre, which builds AI agents for crypto-native finance teams that handle reconciliation, treasury and month-end close.3536 MoonPay says Entendre customers automate 93% of journal entries and close their books three times faster, though these are company figures.3640 Founder Kareem Khattab became MoonPay's vice president of applied AI.31

Put together, the strategy looks clear. MoonPay wants to be the regulated layer that connects agents to money across the whole cycle: funding, execution, bookkeeping and off-ramping back to fiat. In an enterprise setting, Kamino in PayBox works as a live test of an agent managing credit positions, which a treasury agent would eventually need to do. One detail is worth noting. MoonPay's August announcement says it supports more than 1,700 enterprise customers, while its releases from February through June said more than 500.81314 The company has not explained the jump, which may come from counting differently or from acquisitions, so the higher number should be read carefully.

The jurisdiction limits show how far the regulatory picture lags behind the technology. MoonPay advertises a New York BitLicense, a trust charter, U.S. money transmitter licenses and EU authorization under MiCA.8 Yet the lending plug-in is switched off in the U.S. and the EU, among other places.1 The most likely explanation is that letting an AI arrange collateralized borrowing raises consumer-protection and credit questions that payments licenses don't cover. Licenses for moving money are not the same as permission to let software borrow money for someone.

Where the coverage diverges

Most reporting agrees on the mechanics but differs in tone. CoinDesk's original story leads with the risks and the excluded markets.1 Trade outlets and MoonPay's own materials talk about a "new frontier for agentic finance."82 Some coverage is also loose on details. TheStreet described the feature as live outside the U.S. without mentioning that the UK, EU and Australia are excluded too.9 Descriptions of Kamino also vary: some call it Solana's largest lending venue, while MoonPay more cautiously calls it one of the largest.78

The competitive picture is still forming. Fortune noted that Robinhood and Coinbase already let users fund agents, and that Visa is building its own AI commerce tools. MoonPay, by contrast, is mostly known as a back-end provider that ordinary consumers don't recognize.21 Prasad's answer is that MoonPay is betting on open rails while bigger companies build closed systems.21

The takeaway

The Kamino integration is a small change in code and a significant one in principle. It moves AI agents from spending money to managing borrowed money. The safeguards are serious: split keys, passkey approvals and spending limits set by the user. But they protect against theft and unauthorized transactions, not against bad financial decisions. Another analyst made a related point at PayBox's launch: an autonomous agent can make a poorly judged transaction that is still perfectly valid under the permissions it was given.23 That concern gets much bigger once leverage is involved. For businesses evaluating autonomous agents, the lesson is that wallet security has largely been solved, while making sure agents act responsibly with credit has not.