XRPL could capture billions in machine payments but only if AI agents choose RLUSD
On Feb. 25, t54 Labs announced that Ripple was a strategic investor in its $5 million seed round investment. t54 describes itself as the trust layer for the fast-rising agentic economy.
The latest artificial intelligence move is small in dollar terms, but larger in what it signals about where Ripple sees the next fight in blockchain infrastructure.
This is because Ripple is not backing a consumer chatbot or another token-branded AI product. It is backing the payment controls, identity checks, and risk infrastructure that could help determine whether autonomous software agents can transact in a way that businesses and regulated institutions are willing to use.
That matters because Ripple is making the bet after saying it has already deployed $550 million into the XRP Ledger (XRPL) ecosystem.
The new t54 investment suggests the company now wants to push XRPL deeper into what it sees as a coming market for machine-to-machine commerce, where software agents buy data, access computing resources, pay for services, and settle small obligations without human intervention.
The pitch is simple. If software agents become meaningful economic actors on the internet, payments will need to happen inside workflows, not after them.
And if those workflows touch regulated money, identity, and compliance become part of the transaction layer, not an afterthought.
That is the opening Ripple is trying to attack.
A payments thesis disguised as an AI story
Much of the market still talks about AI in crypto as a branding contest. Ripple’s move points in a different direction. The company appears to be treating AI as a payments-and-settlement problem.
t54 Labs is building around that premise. Its work focuses on identity, fraud and risk monitoring, and credit rails for autonomous agents. It is also tied to a live x402 implementation on XRPL.
x402 revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code to request and settle payments directly within web requests.
In practice, that means an agent can call an endpoint, receive a payment challenge, pay automatically, and continue its workflow, all without relying on subscriptions, invoices, API keys, or manual reconciliation.
Coinbase has promoted x402 as an open standard for machine-native payments, but the standard itself is only part of the story. The rails behind it matter.
For Ripple, the thesis is that a more agentic internet will require programmable, fast, and cheap payment systems.
However, those characteristics alone are not enough if the transactions are intended to serve businesses, financial firms, or other counterparties subject to compliance obligations.
That is where the company appears to see a gap.
The harder problem is not payment, but accountability
Sending value across a blockchain is no longer the hard part because most major networks can do that quickly enough for a large share of use cases.
In light of this, the harder question is whether a counterparty can understand who or what is on the other side of the transaction.
If an autonomous agent is paying for services, businesses will want to know who controls it, what permissions it has, whether it can be stopped, how its behavior is monitored, and who bears liability if something goes wrong.
Those concerns are operational requirements. They define the threshold regulated firms use to determine whether a system is ready for production.
t54’s roadmap is designed around those problems. Instead of assuming the agent economy can run on anonymous wallets and loose coordination, it starts from the premise that identity, verification, real-time risk controls, and credit assessment are required if autonomous software is going to scale into serious commerce.
That gives Ripple’s investment a clearer strategic logic. The company aims to position XRPL within AI as foundational infrastructure. It is working to build the trust layer that would enable XRPL to operate as a settlement venue for machine-driven activity.
The distinction is important. Plenty of chains may support AI applications. Far fewer are trying to become the place where regulated machine commerce can clear and settle.
XRPL’s more recent direction fits that framing. Features such as Permissioned Domains and a Permissioned DEX point to a model in which regulated actors can operate in controlled environments, using allowlists, credentials, and restricted access while still interacting with public blockchain infrastructure.
If AI agents are expected to transact with institutions that must satisfy KYC and AML requirements, sanctions screening, and policy-based access rules, that permissioned path becomes relevant.
In that model, the central issue becomes the form of payment itself: agents must be paid in a format that compliance teams can approve.
RLUSD could matter more than transaction fees
If agentic commerce grows, stablecoins are likely to become the preferred working asset.
Constant machine-to-machine payments are difficult to manage when assets are volatile. Software agents buying data, compute, or access need something closer to digital cash than to a speculative instrument whose value can move materially in a short span.
That gives Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, an important role in the thesis.
Ripple’s own data places RLUSD circulating supply at about $1.5386 billion, with $1.6109 billion in reserve funds.
The more revealing metric for XRPL is the stablecoin liquidity currently sitting on the ledger, rather than the headline supply.
Data from DeFiLlama puts the total stablecoin float on XRPL at about $415.09 million, with RLUSD accounting for roughly 83.10% of that float.
That gap is important. It suggests RLUSD may be spread across venues and networks, while the on-ledger settlement money stock inside XRPL remains much smaller.
For Ripple, the growth question centers on whether autonomous workflows choose to hold and move stable balances on XRPL itself, ultimately determining how RLUSD expands.
That is where the economics become more interesting.
XRPL’s base fee remains tiny, typically 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, and that fee is destroyed. Even a sharp rise in activity would probably leave the burn economically minor relative to the XRP supply.
The more material effect would be on liquidity. If machine commerce grows on XRPL, demand for stablecoin float, routing liquidity, and market-making balances could grow with it.
That is a more durable story than relying on transaction fees alone to change the economics of the network.
Ripple does not need to win AI agents outright
The competitive backdrop makes this clearer. Ripple is not entering a field where XRPL already dominates AI-agent activity.
Data from agentsevm shows Ethereum currently leads in deployed AI agents by network, with 27,903. Coinbase-backed Base is next at 20,623.
Those numbers reinforce where the center of gravity sits today, around deep liquidity, battle-tested smart contracts, and strong developer network effects.
Ripple’s bet appears to be something narrower, and potentially more practical. It does not need XRPL to become the primary home for every agent.
However, it needs XRPL to capture a meaningful share of the payment and settlement layer used by those agents.
That is where the scenario modeling becomes useful.
If x402 reaches 200 million transactions a year and XRPL captures 2% through integrations such as t54’s facilitator, that would amount to 4 million transactions a year, or about 11,000 a day. That would be visible, but not transformative.
Meanwhile, if x402 reaches 1 billion transactions a year and XRPL captures 5%, activity would rise to 50 million transactions a year, or about 137,000 a day.
At that level, the effect could become more important for ecosystem attention, builder incentives and on-ledger liquidity needs.
In a higher-end case, where x402 reaches 10 billion transactions a year and XRPL captures 5%, the ledger would handle 500 million transactions a year, or about 1.37 million a day.
That would represent a genuine step-change, not just in traffic, but in the need for robust compliance tools, stable settlement balances, and reliable developer infrastructure.
XRPL can generate meaningful impact with even a modest single-digit share of a large machine-payment market. Even limited penetration at scale would carry weight.
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