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Payments giant Mastercard has officially launched the Agent Pay for Machines program for autonomous settlements between AI agents. The project was supported by more than 30 industry leaders, including Stripe, Coinbase and OKX, but the main object of attention was Ripple, which demonstrated two completely different approaches to the use of its assets, RLUSD and XRP, on the same day.
In an official statement, Ripple confirmed that the affiliated blockchain XRP Ledger (XRPL) and the regulated stablecoin RLUSD formed the basis of Mastercard's payment system for verifying digital passports of robots and controlling transaction limits.
Mastercard cuts out XRP, but RippleX launches a workaround
The catch is that in the context of the Mastercard pilot, the native XRP token is not mentioned at all, which indicates that cryptocurrencies still remain too risky for the traditional financial giant. Because of this, the choice predictably fell on the RLUSD stablecoin.
This corporate isolation of the token, however, did not prevent Ripple from revealing its potential at the open-source level. In parallel with the Mastercard announcement, RippleX announced the launch of its own solution - the XRPL AI Starter Kit, where the XRP token received direct use in AI commerce.
RippleX head of engineering J. Ayo Akinyele presented the technical parameters of this integration:
- X402 protocol: Support for direct agent-to-agent payments has been introduced, allowing AI robots to pay each other for API requests and computing services using both RLUSD and the XRP token from day one.
- DEX conversion: If a robot on the Mastercard side sends RLUSD, the built-in XRPL decentralized exchange allows the recipient on the other end to automatically receive the payout in XRP within 3–5 seconds.
- Claude Skills: The popular Claude neural network from Anthropic received direct integration for generating wallets, checking balances and sending transactions in XRP and RLUSD at the code level.
It seems that an obvious compromise has formed in the market for Ripple: inside Mastercard's conservative perimeter, the XRP token is indeed not used because of strict business requirements for price stability.
At the same time, at the level of independent AI development, the company is positioning XRP as a basic settlement asset, offering robots predictable low-cost fees.
U.Today Editorial Team
Dan Burgin
