MoonPay has open-sourced the Open Wallet Standard (OWS), a local-first protocol designed to solve one of the most overlooked problems in the agentic economy: where does an AI agent's private key actually live?

The Problem

Every agent framework today handles key management differently — private keys stuffed into .env files, environment variables, or plaintext JSON configs. Agents hold keys in memory for entire sessions. Multi-chain setups mean multiple keys, multiple signing libraries, multiple leak surfaces. Cloud KMS services add network latency and custodial dependency on every signature.

OWS addresses this with a single encrypted vault stored locally (~/.ows/), one BIP-39 mnemonic that derives wallets for all supported chains (EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Tron, TON, Cosmos), and a signing interface where the agent never sees the private key. Keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, decrypted only during signing in mlocked memory, then zeroized immediately. The core is written in Rust with Node.js and Python bindings.

The Coalition

OWS launched with 21 founding organizations backing it: MoonPay, PayPal, Circle, OKX, Ripple, Ethereum Foundation, Solana Foundation, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Sui, TON Foundation, Filecoin Foundation, LayerZero, Virtuals, and six others. Several are already integrating OWS into their SDKs.

The spec is CC0-licensed and positions OWS as the wallet layer beneath existing payment protocols like x402 and MPP — those define how agents pay, OWS defines where the key lives.

Early Traction

Within 24 hours of launch: 2,000+ installs, 200+ GitHub stars, 20+ repository forks, and 1,500+ followers on the @OpenWallet account. The project is also being featured at the Solana Frontier Hackathon running April 6–May 11.

Get started: npm install @open-wallet-standard/core