XRP Ledger AI Payments Top 13 Million as Merchant Push Begins

A big count, and a quieter question

The XRP Ledger now handles a growing share of machine-to-machine payments. RippleX engineering head J. Ayo Akinyele said on October 9–10 that the network had processed more than 13 million payments made by AI agents through the x402 protocol, spread across 166 registered merchants. He estimated that these agent payments now make up about a quarter of all ledger activity.14 He also suggested that 100 million such transactions "might actually come sooner than we expect." Coverage was careful to treat that as a forecast, not a target with a deadline.1

Chandler Fang, a former Ripple product lead who co-founded t54.ai, the Ripple-backed company whose facilitator handles much of this traffic, gave the most useful forward-looking comment. He called the climb from about 1 million transactions in July to more than 13 million in October growth that is "compounding faster than most expected." In his view, the next step is getting more real-world merchants and services onchain, with agents paying in XRP or RLUSD and settling through t54's x402 facilitator.6

That framing is the right one, and this piece argues it matters more than the headline number. For fintech and payments readers, the issue isn't whether the counter reaches 100 million. It's whether pay-per-call settlement becomes a real way to sell APIs, data and compute. On that question, the evidence so far is mixed.

What actually happened

The figures come mainly from the XRPL AI Hub, a dashboard run by t54. Around the time of Akinyele's post it showed 13,489,468 agent transactions and 168 registered merchants, with about 6,982 XRP and 12,010 RLUSD settled in total.16 Another snapshot reported a little earlier put the total at 13,417,943 payments, with 178 active agents, 166 merchants and 2,289 services that accept payment.910 One later check found the tracker above 13.6 million.1

The pace has been steep. XRPL passed its first million agent payments on July 8, after t54 launched the AI Hub.1 t54 and Akinyele said the network crossed 10 million on October 1, less than three months after the first million.13 A week later, Fang said the ledger had settled more than 8 million x402 payments in the previous 30 days.12

Ripple has spent months building toward this. Its XRPL AI Starter Kit, released June 9, added x402 support for XRP and RLUSD. It also included tools that let agents create wallets, check balances, start transfers and look up transaction records.1 t54 wrote the XRPL implementation of x402 that shipped in the kit.12 At XRP Seoul 2026 on October 3, Akinyele described the next layer of agent infrastructure: verifiable identities, permissions and spending limits that control what an agent can do, and secure smart wallets that hold XRP and stablecoins.26

Why x402 matters for payments and API businesses

The API economy is the clearest reason to pay attention. x402 brings back HTTP status code 402, "Payment Required," which went mostly unused for decades. A server can answer a request with a price and payment instructions. The agent then sends a signed transfer and retries the request with proof of payment. A facilitator checks the payment, submits it to the ledger and confirms settlement before the service responds.1

That removes several parts of today's API billing: pre-issued keys, stored cards, monthly subscriptions and a human approving a checkout.13 Ripple's documentation says the model suits APIs, data subscriptions and AI model inference. An application could pay for a single data-feed call or a burst of compute without signing up for a plan.1 Reporting from early October said agents were increasingly buying financial services per call instead of by subscription. Akinyele also said that although inference and data still make up most of the volume, x402 services are starting to appear in financial data, risk and credit APIs.13

Ripple's pitch for XRPL in this market rests on speed and predictable costs. Settlement usually takes three to five seconds.1 One outlet noted that fees are fixed in advance rather than set by gas auctions, which lets agents stay within preset budgets.8 RLUSD matters here as well. A dollar-backed stablecoin lets merchants price services in a fixed amount, while XRP's market value moves.1 One practical catch for integrators: an account has to set up a trust line with the issuer before it can hold or receive RLUSD.1

The standards picture favors Ripple's approach too. Coinbase created x402, and the standard is now run by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Ripple is a premier member.910 Other members reportedly include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Circle, AWS and Google.13 Separately, Ripple has added XRP and RLUSD support for agent payments on Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol.13 That points to a strategy of supporting several machine-payment standards rather than betting on one.

Where the reporting diverges

Across outlets, the coverage agrees on the main facts: more than 13 million payments, about 166–168 merchants, the 25% estimate and Fang's focus on merchants. The details differ, and the differences tell you something.

The first is merchant counts. Akinyele cited 166. The dashboard later showed 168. Some stories rounded down to "more than 160."168 That gap is small and fits steady onboarding. The second is settlement figures, where some reports described the XRP and RLUSD totals as counts of transactions.916 More careful coverage described them as cumulative amounts settled.16 Read that way, more than 13 million payments have moved only a few thousand units of each asset.

That leads to the most important point. Using the XRP price of about $1.50 reported earlier this month,13 the total value settled across all those transactions comes to roughly tens of thousands of dollars. That works out to a fraction of a cent per payment on average. This is a rough estimate, but it matches the more skeptical reporting. One outlet noted that rising transaction counts don't mean matching growth in value or revenue, and that the dashboard can't separate independent businesses from repeated automated requests or experimental apps.1 An earlier analysis estimated that the first 1.4 million or so payments produced only about $280 in fees.1 Tiny payments are the point of x402, but they make transaction counts a poor stand-in for economic activity.

The third difference is less noticed: the daily pace looks uneven. Reports around October 1 cited more than 600,000 x402 payments settled per day.13 Coverage on October 4 cited a seven-day average of 525,618. The hub showed about 350,460 a day around October 7.12 By the October 10 snapshot, the seven-day average was 216,145.910 Some of this may come from different measurement windows and sources, and the cumulative total kept rising. Still, it sits awkwardly next to claims that growth is compounding. It suggests activity comes in bursts, possibly from a small number of heavy users. With only 178 active agents in the dataset,9 that would not be surprising.

The 25% figure needs similar care. Akinyele gave no time period or method for it.1 The counts also come from t54's own indexer, which identifies x402 activity using known facilitator identifiers.1 In practice, the company whose facilitator is being measured is also the main source of the numbers. That isn't evidence of inflation, but independent trackers that read directly from validated ledgers deserve more weight as the numbers grow.

What comes next

Fang's view is the correct one, and Ripple's own messaging is moving the same way. Coverage of his 30-day figure noted that his focus is shifting from transaction counts to merchant adoption, because ongoing activity depends on agents having useful services to buy.12 He named no new merchant partnerships and gave no new targets, so the expansion still depends on developers building the integrations and merchants accepting automated payments.1

For banks and payment API providers, the identity and spending-control work Akinyele described in Seoul may matter more than the transaction count.2 Enterprise buyers won't let software spend company money without permissions, limits and audit trails. Whether those tools ship and work will likely decide if XRPL's agent traffic grows from many tiny inference calls into business in credit, risk and financial data, which Akinyele says is already beginning.13

To sum up: XRPL has shown that its technology can handle machine-speed micropayments at scale and that developers are using it. It hasn't yet shown that this traffic adds up to meaningful revenue for merchants. The 100-million mark will make for a good headline. The figures to track are the dollar value settled, the number of independent merchants, and whether daily volume settles at a steady level instead of rising and falling in bursts.