According to The Block, Ripple has announced a new developer toolkit designed for building “agentic payment” applications on the XRP Ledger, or XRPL. The toolkit is aimed at developers creating systems in which AI agents can execute automated financial transactions, including payment and settlement flows that do not rely on direct human action at every step.
Ripple said AI agents are no longer just a future-facing concept. In its description, these agents are already taking part in real financial activity, such as paying for computing resources, settling invoices, and completing transactions without human intervention. As the use of AI agents expands, infrastructure for machine-oriented payments is being built more quickly, including wallets and stablecoin payment channels that allow AI systems to pay for services and trade assets autonomously.
The announcement comes during a week in which other major crypto and fintech platforms also outlined related efforts. Robinhood introduced a plan that allows users to try stock trading executed by AI agents, with an intention to expand the effort to crypto assets in the future. MetaMask also released a non-custodial wallet solution designed for AI agents, adding another example of infrastructure being adapted for automated on-chain activity.
Ripple said traditional payment systems are mainly structured around human-initiated and human-approved processes. By contrast, AI agents require infrastructure that can deliver fast settlement, predictable outcomes, and payment execution without manual approval. The company emphasized that its new toolkit also supports payment capabilities based on the x402 protocol, with settlement available through XRP and Ripple USD, also known as RLUSD.
At the same time, researchers from multiple universities working as the IC3 team said that although the combination of AI and blockchain can enable automated transactions, AI agents still remain highly dependent on humans and the underlying infrastructure. In their view, such agents do not possess full independence, even when they are able to participate in automated trading or payment workflows.