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

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.

And that is the market Ripple is entering. Predictable transaction costs matter if agents are making many small payments, and fast settlement count if an agent needs to move to the next step after confirmation. A native DEX – in theory – could let an agent send RLUSD and have the receiver take XRP, or the reverse, without routing through an external swap contract.

A “no smart contract execution risk” feature cited by the company in the release is also useful for developers. XRPL payment functions are built into the protocol rather than arbitrary contract code. That could appeal to institutions that want agent payments but do not want every payment path to depend on a new smart contract.

But x402 has its own risk layer, generally speaking. A recent academic paper argued that x402 introduces web-and-chain failure points around authorization and payment-service synchronization.

The protocol has to connect a normal web request with an on-chain payment which creates new failure points – a service could accept the wrong proof of payment, fail to match a payment to the right request, or let an old payment be reused. In plain terms, the website and the blockchain have to agree on who paid, what they paid for and whether the payment is still valid.

Ripple did not announce named customers, transaction volumes or a production deployment using XRP or RLUSD for agent payments at scale.