RLUSD's Next Big Move? Google and Mastercard Integration Fuel AI Payments

Chandler Fang, cofounder of t54ai, a company building an agentic economy on the $XRP Ledger, makes a prediction for Ripple USD ($RLUSD) stablecoin as agentic payments gain traction.

According to Fang, given that $RLUSD natively supports x402 and all mainstream agentic protocols by Google and Mastercard, it has the potential to unlock hundreds (and, in the future, millions) of agentic merchants and services.

Fang stated this in response to new milestones unlocked by $RLUSD, with the stablecoin recently listed on Korea's major exchanges, Upbit and Bithumb, following earlier listings by Coinone and Korbit.

In June, Ripple launched the XRPL AI Starter Kit, a new set of tools and integrations designed to help developers build agentic payment applications on the $XRP Ledger (XRPL). The launch included support for X402-powered payments using $XRP and Ripple USD ($RLUSD), enabling AI agents to transact for APIs, compute, and other digital services.

As reported, agent payments on the $XRP Ledger now support Mastercard's Verifiable Intent standard. Aligned with Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and designed to be protocol-agnostic, Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf, establishing a shared source of truth across the ecosystem.

$RLUSD enters agentic payments

$RLUSD finds a use case in agentic payments given that many agentic workflows might need price stability to enable use cases such as invoice settlement, payroll, and agent-to-agent commerce. The same transaction primitives that move $XRP also support $RLUSD, and $RLUSD can be exchanged for other assets through the XRPL DEX.

$RLUSD also finds utility for agents that need to denominate value in dollars and for agent workflows where issuer credibility and regulatory considerations matter.

In a separate milestone, Nuvion, the AI-powered global banking and cross-border payments platform built on fiat and stablecoins for businesses and fintechs, announced the integration of Ripple USD ($RLUSD) into its infrastructure platform earlier in July.

Ripple has joined the Linux Foundation's x402 Foundation, alongside Visa, Mastercard, Google, Amazon Web Services, and 35 other organizations, to build an open payment standard for AI agents and internet applications.