XRPL AI Payments Jumps 29% as XRP Falls, RLUSD Hits $2.4B

AI-driven payments using XRP and Ripple USD are approaching 4 million transactions, but the more notable development may be how quickly the activity is accelerating.

Data cited by t54 show approximately 3,992,146 agentic transactions have settled through its XRP Ledger x402 infrastructure. That compares with roughly 3.1 million on Sept. 1, implying almost 892,000 additional transactions in four days, or growth of about 29%. 

The activity comes as XRP itself trades around $1.40, down roughly 4% over the past 24 hours, creating a fresh divergence between token price and one fast-growing area of XRPL usage. 

XRPL Went From 1M to Nearly 4M Agent Payments in Weeks

The acceleration becomes clearer with a longer comparison.

In July, XRPL agentic payments had only recently crossed 1 million, when RippleX engineering head J. Ayo Akinyele discussed a potential path toward 10 million to 100 million transactions over the coming years.

Now the tracked count is already approaching four times that initial milestone.

The infrastructure is built around x402, an HTTP-native payment protocol that lets software agents pay for digital services without a conventional checkout process. On XRPL, agents can use either XRP or RLUSD to purchase API access, compute, data or other machine-readable services. 

Ripple formally expanded that strategy in June through its XRPL AI Starter Kit, which packages tools for autonomous payments and supports x402 transactions using XRP and RLUSD. 

RLUSD Adds Another Growth Engine

Agent payments are arriving as Ripple’s stablecoin is expanding rapidly.

RLUSD’s market capitalization stood near $2.40 billion on Sept. 4, up from roughly $2.07 billion on Aug. 25 — an increase of around 16% in ten days. 

That follows RLUSD crossing $2 billion only recently, a milestone covered in Coinpaper’s RLUSD growth analysis.

The pairing is important because autonomous agents do not necessarily want price volatility. XRP can serve as the native XRPL asset, while RLUSD gives machines a dollar-denominated payment option.

Mastercard Connection Is About Trust, Not XRP Adoption

There is also a broader payments angle.

t54 has been selected for Mastercard’s Start Path Agentic Commerce & Services program, while its infrastructure supports Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent framework. Mastercard designed the standard to prove who authorized an AI agent, what it was allowed to do and what purchase was intended. 

That should not be interpreted as Mastercard adopting XRP as a settlement asset. Instead, it connects XRPL-based agent payments to a broader industry effort to solve one of autonomous commerce’s hardest problems: how to let machines spend money without surrendering control over authorization and risk.

The timing is notable. India is separately preparing agentic payments for its massive UPI network, while Mastercard, Visa and other payment companies are building their own autonomous-commerce infrastructure. 

So the 4-million milestone matters less as an isolated record than as evidence that XRPL is competing for a place in an emerging machine-payment market, even while XRP’s price tells a much quieter story.