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

Ripple is trying to put XRP and RLUSD into the market for AI-agent payments in an environment that is still mostly paying in the dollar-pegged USDC stablecoin.

The company introduced the XRPL AI Starter Kit earlier this week, a set of developer tools for building AI agents that can send payments on the XRP Ledger, per a release shared with CoinDesk.

This kit includes XRPL documentation access through an MCP server (which connects a service’s AI tools to external data sources), Claude skills for wallet creation, balance checks and payments, and support for x402 payments using XRP and Ripple USD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin.

The pitch is that if AI agents are going to buy API access, pay for model inference, settle invoices or move value between services, they need payment rails that are cheap, fast and easy to trigger without a human clicking approve each time.

Ripple says XRPL can do that with three-to-five-second settlement, predictable fees, native payments, escrow, multisig and a built-in decentralized exchange.

But turning that into actual usage is where challenges lie, with the novel x402 system in focus.