RippleX’s head of engineering expects the number of agentic transactions on XRP Ledger to climb rapidly after recently topping 1 million.

"I was very pleased to see the 1 million milestone on XRP Ledger, but I think we’ll blast through 10 million ... [and] may even get to 100 million within the next couple of years given the pace of development with agents and how the infrastructure continues to get better," RippleX Head of Engineering Ayo Akinyele told The Block.

Agentic payments refer to transactions initiated by AI-powered software acting on behalf of humans, rather than payments manually approved one at a time. Crypto companies see an opportunity to provide these agents with digital wallets, allowing them to make programmable payments onchain and around-the-clock without relying on traditional bank accounts or credit cards.

Interest in the technology has intensified as developers envision a world in which AI agents autonomously pay for data, computing power and other services needed to complete assigned tasks.

"The main focus, obviously, is making it frictionless for AI agents to pay for APIs and digital services on XRP Ledger because of the strengths that we offer from a settlement perspective — so, three to five seconds," Akinyele said. "We have predictability in terms of transaction costs, and we’ve been purpose-built for payments from the get-go."

Ripple is among dozens of major companies that recently joined the x402 Foundation. Alongside Coinbase, Circle, AWS, Google, Mastercard, Stripe and Visa, Ripple serves as a premier member. Originally developed by Coinbase, x402 allows AI agents and applications to automatically pay for APIs and other online services.

"Our relationship with the x402 Foundation is really strategic because we can shape the governance, we can shape the technical aspects of how this agentic economy gets built out," Akinyele added.

Although many agentic payment advocates imagine a world where AI agents are purchasing everything from computing power to physical goods, so far, most activity on XRP Ledger has involved payments for APIs and data, according to t54.

"We’re also in the process of onboarding real-world merchants through ecosystem partners, which will enable agents to purchase physical goods and services over XRPL," t54 co-founder Chandler Fang said. "That’s one of the next major areas of growth we’re actively rolling out." The tech infrastructure startup t54 is backed by Ripple.