The XRP Ledger has processed over 1 million agentic transactions, marking an early benchmark for one of the crypto industry’s most closely watched payment use cases. RippleX Head of Engineering Ayo Akinyele now expects that number to climb rapidly, predicting the network will ‘blast through 10 million’ and could reach 100 million within the next couple of years.
Agentic payments are transactions initiated by AI-powered software acting on behalf of users, allowing digital wallets to pay for APIs, data, computing power, and other services without traditional bank accounts or card rails. Akinyele highlighted the XRP Ledger’s three-to-five-second settlement times, predictable costs, and payments-first design as key advantages for such small, frequent machine-to-machine payments. Most activity so far involves payments for APIs and data.
The concept has gained significant attention as companies build toward autonomous AI agents that can complete tasks independently. Ripple has also joined the x402 Foundation as a premier member alongside Coinbase, Circle, AWS, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa. The foundation, originally developed by Coinbase, creates a standard for AI agents and applications to automatically pay for online services. Akinyele called the relationship ‘strategic’ because it allows Ripple to shape the governance and technical aspects of the emerging agentic economy.
Beyond digital services, Ripple-backed infrastructure startup t54 is working to onboard real-world merchants through ecosystem partners, enabling agents to purchase physical goods and services over the XRPL. Co-founder Chandler Fang called this ‘one of the next major areas of growth’ actively being rolled out.
