Key Takeaways
Crypto payments firm MoonPay has acquired Dawn Labs, an artificial intelligence research lab, and launched an AI-native tool for automated trading on prediction markets. The move comes just a week after prediction market competitor Kalshi closed a $1 billion funding round.
"The team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea," said Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO and Founder of MoonPay. "With Dawn, traders can direct AI agents to develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies autonomously."
The new product, Dawn CLI, enables users to describe a trading strategy in natural language, which the system then converts into executable code. The tool automates research, simulation, and the live execution of user-directed trades. The initial rollout will support Polymarket, one of the fastest-growing prediction market platforms, with plans to add more venues. The acquisition brings Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad to MoonPay as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs.
This push into AI-powered trading reflects a broader industry trend, with firms like Gemini and Coinbase recently launching their own AI-related features. However, the expansion into prediction markets is not without risk. These platforms face multiple state-level lawsuits and scrutiny from US lawmakers over concerns of illegal sports betting and the potential for insider trading, as highlighted by a recent case involving a soldier using classified information on Polymarket.
The core of the new offering is its simplicity. "Until now, building and running a systematic trading strategy required you to be a developer, a quant, and a portfolio manager," Neeraj Prasad, now Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, told Decrypt. "Dawn collapses that into a single interface."
The move aligns with MoonPay's strategy to build out a full stack for digital value, covering funding, tokenization, trading, and spending. The company views AI agents not as a separate customer base, but as an extension of human traders. "A human sets the strategy, and the agent executes it,” Prasad said.
The focus on prediction markets follows significant growth and investment in the sector. Kalshi, a competitor to Polymarket, recently saw its valuation double to about $22 billion after a $1 billion funding round. The increasing integration of AI into crypto is also impacting asset prices. As of May 11, 2026, Bitcoin (BTC) traded at $81,894.00, while Ethereum (ETH) was at $2,338.54. AI-related tokens such as Fetch.ai (FET) and Render (RNDR) were trading at $0.235277 and $1.97 respectively, according to CoinGecko data.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
