Ripple has just signed a major new partnership with Stripe-owned Privy. The goal is to integrate AI-driven payment and embedded wallet solutions into the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
Per Ripple’s announcement, this integration lets developers build payment apps using XRP, Ripple USD (RLUSD), etc., without requiring users to manage private keys themselves.
It puts a big focus on the rising field of agentic commerce, so AI agents can autonomously own funds, transact, and pay for things.
Using Privy’s programmable wallet technology, app developers can easily build and manage wallets for XRPL, allow users to approve transactions, and even embed crypto payments into their apps.
Big e-commerce play
This integration focuses a lot on the open payment protocol x402, which aims to simplify automated software-to-software transactions.
x402 allows AI agents to handle payments for digital goods like computational power, API access, AI model inference, etc., without requiring manual transaction approval.
For instance, an AI agent could autonomously purchase a service (e.g., access to data), pay for it with XRP, RLUSD, etc., and then receive the data.
This could make XRP Ledger a key settlement network for machine-to-machine commerce.
13 million AI payments on XRP Ledger
Per Ripple, XRPL has processed approximately 13 million payments from AI agents so far, which currently account for about 25% of XRPL activity.
RippleX engineering head J. Ayo Akinyele shared this update earlier in October. Automated transactions have been exploding: from approximately 1 million in July to approximately 13 million in October.
That said, it should be noted that these are not necessarily large payment amounts. Most machine-to-machine payments deal with relatively small amounts of crypto.
This new partnership is part of Ripple’s push to drive AI-powered commerce. They released an AI Starter Kit back in June, which allows developers to build autonomous payment apps using XRP, RLUSD, and the x402 protocol.
Privy will add more features (e.g., transaction policy controls and fee sponsorship) as this integration continues.
This partnership may make it easier for developers to add automated payments and could broaden the use cases of XRP Ledger well beyond crypto payments.
