Ripple wants AI agents to pay in XRP and RLUSD. The market is still mostly USDC

Ripple is trying to put $XRP and $RLUSD into the market for AI-agent payments in an environment that is still mostly paying in the dollar-pegged $USDC stablecoin.

The company introduced the XRPL AI Starter Kit earlier this week, a set of developer tools for building AI agents that can send payments on the $XRP Ledger, per a release shared with CoinDesk.

This kit includes XRPL documentation access through an MCP server (which connects a service's AI tools to external data sources), Claude skills for wallet creation, balance checks and payments, and support for x402 payments using $XRP and Ripple USD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin.

The pitch is that if AI agents are going to buy API access, pay for model inference, settle invoices or move value between services, they need payment rails that are cheap, fast and easy to trigger without a human clicking approve each time.

Ripple says XRPL can do that with three-to-five-second settlement, predictable fees, native payments, escrow, multisig and a built-in decentralized exchange.

But turning that into actual usage is where challenges lie, with the novel x402 system in focus.

The protocol, created by Coinbase and now stewarded by the Linux Foundation’s x402 Foundation, uses the old HTTP 402 “Payment Required” code to let machines pay for online resources inside normal web requests. An agent asks for a paid service, receives a payment request, sends an on-chain payment and resubmits the request with proof.

The service makes payments feel more like API calls - or a common system that allow one application to request data or services from another application. The early market for this has been narrow so far, and mostly dominated by stablecoins.

A Chainalysis report from early June showed x402 activity on Base rose from near zero in mid-2025 to more than 100 million cumulative transactions through the first quarter of 2026. But a major late-2025 surge was driven in part by PING, a pay-to-mint meme coin experiment that turned x402 payments into a speculative loop.

A public x402 dashboard from Web3 Trackers shows more than 120 million cumulative transactions, over $41 million of $USDC volume settled, 14 supported chains and an average payment size of about 5 cents. Base accounted for about 70 million transactions and $21.5 million of volume, while Solana accounted for about 45 million transactions and $16.4 million.