Ripple backs AI agent payments with RLUSD growth and new developer toolkit
The XRP Ledger’s stablecoin supply has climbed to approximately $770 million over the past 30 days, a 97% surge driven almost entirely by Ripple’s RLUSD, according to DeFiLlama data. The network now sits within striking distance of a $1 billion supply milestone as Ripple positions XRPL as infrastructure for autonomous AI agent payments in enterprise and institutional contexts.
RLUSD accounts for $761.7 million of that supply, or 99% of all stablecoins on the ledger, giving Ripple outsized influence over the network’s dollar layer. The stablecoin’s total market capitalization across supported blockchains stands at $1.65 billion. Stablecoin liquidity on XRPL nearly doubled over the past month, while 30-day transfer volume reached $4.95 billion, up 122%.
This week, Ripple released the XRPL AI Starter Kit, which includes an MCP server for querying XRPL documentation, Claude skills for wallet creation and payments, and tutorials for building agentic transactions. The toolkit arrives as Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a service for machine-speed payments across software agents and automated workflows, with Ripple named among participating companies.
The agentic payments market is accelerating faster than many expected. Early 2025 saw transactions worth at least $1 account for 49% of total value transferred through agentic payment protocols. That share has now climbed to 95%. Base, Solana, and Polygon currently lead in hosting active developer deployments for agentic payments, though much early activity on Base came from meme coin farming and speculative testing of x402-based payment flows.
XRPL’s architecture supports rule-based controls without manual approval. Transactions settle in seconds with predictable fees at the protocol layer rather than through smart contract code. The network supports escrow, multi-signing, deposit authorization, and trust lines to limit agent spending and conditions. XRPL now supports x402 payments using XRP or RLUSD through a contribution from t54, allowing agents to pay for API calls and model inference.
“Enterprises will only allow autonomous agents to move at machine speed if the necessary controls move with them,” said Markus Infanger, senior vice president of RippleX. “The agent economy is developing faster than many observers expect, with billions of dollars in value potentially moving through agent-to-agent workflows as AI systems pay for services, access data, and settle transactions autonomously,” added J. Ayo Akinyele, head of engineering at RippleX.
The agentic payments market is projected at $7 billion today, with forecasts suggesting $182.97 billion by 2033, an implied annual growth rate of 50%. Base recorded roughly 100 million agentic payment transactions in approximately three quarters.
Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC remain the industry’s deepest sources of dollar liquidity, dominating the broader stablecoin market. Ripple’s strategy targets a narrower niche: fast, rule-based settlements for machines that do not require human intermediaries or smart contract overhead.
