Ripple makes its play as agentic payments get crowded

• Key insight: Ripple released tools for third parties to build agentic payments on the company's network.
• What's at stake: The blockchain company is trying to add more use cases for its stablecoin technology. 
• Forward look: The card networks and other fintechs are also betting on agentic payments, creating a competitive market.

Ripple, which has spent years trying to build a digital asset payments network, is now adding agentic artificial intelligence as an additional enticement.

The blockchain company has introduced a tool kit for third parties to build agentic payments on Ripple's XRP Ledger, a blockchain that Ripple has used for years to enable cross-border payments without the need for correspondent banks or other intermediaries.

"Many cross-border payments still require someone to approve, initiate, or reconcile a transaction at some point in the workflow," Ayo Akinyele, senior director of engineering at RippleX, Ripple's developer-focused platform, told American Banker. "What AI agents introduce is the possibility of automating parts of that process."

The battle for agentic payments

Ripple announced its tool kit, called the XRPL AI Starter Kit, at around the same time that Visa announced an agentic commerce collaboration with OpenAI and Mastercard said it will expand its agentic payment network. In another move, Coinbase this week enabled agentic AI for trading and payments. Banks are also lining up strategies to use agentic AI internally and to support financial products. 

"Agentic commerce is such a new area; everyone is going to have an opportunity to carve out a piece of that market and possibly even dominate it," Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker. "Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Stripe are all moving aggressively in the space, the reality is that digital assets and stablecoins are looking for compelling use cases, and since the agentic market has yet to be scaled up and winners declared, it seems like the best opportunity."

Ripple, founded in 2012, initially pitched itself as crypto for banks; its pitch to banks was that it had built a cryptocurrency tailored for bank use, especially international payments. In more recent years it has also tried to court interest from banks to partner on stablecoin and other digital asset projects. Ripple additionally recently received a national trust charter. 

In an analyst note, Motley Fool said the growth in XRP and the end of Ripple's regulatory battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over how XRP would be regulated have improved Ripple's outlook against rivals in digital assets and payments. 

There are many unanswered questions in Ripple's tool kit regarding accountability for errors that the card networks are better positioned to answer, being in the business of administering governance frameworks, Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, told American Banker.  

"I continue to see the model of a 'stablecoin sandwich,' where stablecoins are used as a settlement mechanism behind cards as the more likely near-term outcome," McPherson said. 

Ripple's tools

Ripple's agentic tool kit supports the x402 protocol, which is a standard for agentic payments that includes Stripe and AWS among its supporters and has enabled more than 75 million transactions totaling $24.4 million over the past 30 days, according to x402's developers. Ripple's tool kit also supports the XRP token and Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin.  

This volume for the x402 payments suggests AI agents are already paying, settling invoices, navigating policy constraints and completing transactions without a human in the loop, according to Ripple, adding that as agentic payments grow, so will a demand for a new infrastructure. 

"There has been a lot of interest in x402, a web-native protocol for payments that was never effectively implemented, as a utility for agent-driven payments," McPherson said.  "Likewise, there has been a lot of interest in stablecoins as an alternative payment rail that agents can plug into which is lower cost for merchants." 

Ripple is smart to plug into the interest in x402, because it benefits from having a strong brand and an integrated technology stack, according to McPherson. "The hype about agents completing transactions autonomously is a bit ahead of where we are."

Since most payment rails were designed for people to initiate, approve and reconcile transactions, autonomous systems need infrastructure that can settle transactions quickly, provide predictable outcomes and operate without manual approval loops, according to Akinyele.

"A well-designed agent can monitor conditions, trigger a payment, handle asset conversion natively, confirm settlement, and move to the next step without requiring manual intervention at every stage," Akinyele said. 

XRPL's native payment functionality helps simplify these workflows by allowing payment and asset conversion to happen as part of the same transaction, according to Ripple. 

"Rather than coordinating separate payment and conversion processes, an agent can execute those actions as part of a single workflow," Akinyele said. "For organizations managing payments across multiple currencies and markets, that has the potential to reduce operational complexity and enable new forms of machine-to-machine commerce."

As AI agents begin initiating transactions at scale, infrastructure characteristics such as low and predictable transaction costs, fast settlement and native asset movement become increasingly important, according to Akinyele. "Those are areas where XRPL has long been designed to operate, which is why we believe it's well positioned to support the next generation of agentic payment applications."