MoonPay buys Dawn Labs, launches Dawn CLI for trading

MoonPay announced on May 11 that it acquired AI research lab Dawn Labs and released Dawn CLI, a command-line tool that converts plain-English trading instructions into live, automated trades. The initial integration runs on Polymarket, a prediction market built on the Polygon blockchain.

Dawn CLI processes a user’s written trading idea through four steps. First, the user submits a plain-text instruction. Second, the system runs automated research on relevant market conditions. Third, it generates trading code based on that research. Fourth, it executes the resulting strategy in real time.

MoonPay described the product as aimed at users who lack programming skills or quantitative expertise and who want to automate trading strategies without writing code. The company said Dawn CLI will begin on Polymarket and that it plans to add support for other exchanges and asset classes; no timeline or additional platform names were provided.

Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad will join MoonPay as Chief Engineer of a new unit called MoonPay Labs. The acquisition moves Dawn’s applied AI work into MoonPay’s engineering stack. MoonPay built its business as a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and says it serves about 30 million customers across 180 countries.

MoonPay noted technical and operational risks associated with natural-language inputs and automated execution. Plain-English instructions can be ambiguous. Automated research or code generation can produce incorrect or misleading outputs, and generated code can behave in unexpected ways. Those failures could lead to unintended trades or financial losses, which differ from algorithmic trading that relies on explicitly coded rules and manual review processes.

MoonPay presented Dawn CLI as a tool to let nontechnical users automate strategies, while keeping the initial rollout focused on a single prediction market.