Ripple's XRP Ledger Now Supports Stripe and Tempo's AI Payment Standard, But No Customers Are Named Yet

Ripple bets on two horses in the AI payments race

Ripple has added support for a second machine-payment standard to its XRP Ledger developer toolkit, according to a RippleX developer post cited by CoinDesk. Version 1.1 of the XRPL AI Starter Kit now works with the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, co-authored by Stripe and the payments-focused blockchain Tempo, which launched its own mainnet in March 2026.

The update also adds the Open Wallet Standard, which lets software manage wallets across multiple blockchains through one interface. According to CoinDesk, that standard lets AI agents initiate transactions without ever touching a private key, with built-in guardrails like spending limits and whitelisted destinations.

"Our job is to make XRP and RLUSD first-class options wherever developers are building," Jazzi Cooper, RippleX's head of product, said on X, as quoted by CoinDesk, Crypto News and KuCoin.

This builds on Ripple's earlier move. Back in June, the company integrated the XRP Ledger with x402, an open payment protocol backed by Stripe, Coinbase and Cloudflare, according to Crypto Briefing. That integration let AI systems, including Anthropic's Claude, create wallets and process payments on their own, using XRP or Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin.

Two competing standards, one company hedging its bets

MPP and x402 are not the same thing. Crypto Briefing describes them as "distinct standards tackling the same problem": letting an AI agent pay a service on the fly, in real time, without a human approving each transaction.

Rather than choose one, Ripple is now plugged into both. CoinDesk frames this directly: "Ripple added support for x402...in June and MPP now, backing both rather than betting on either." Coinbase, notably, runs its own separate x402 integration on its Base network, meaning Ripple is one of several players chasing the same emerging category from different angles.

Ripple has also joined Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines program, a group of more than 30 companies, including Stripe and Coinbase, building infrastructure for what the industry calls agentic commerce, according to Cryptonomist.

The session-payment mechanic, and its limits

The practical selling point is what CoinDesk calls XRP payment channels: an AI agent deposits XRP once, then runs hundreds of small paid queries against a service, settling the accumulated total without putting every individual transaction on-chain. That's built for high-frequency, low-value machine payments, like an agent paying per API call.

There's a catch. According to CoinDesk and KuCoin, that session feature currently only works with XRP. Extending it to stablecoins like RLUSD depends on a proposed ledger upgrade that has not gone live.

What the sources don't show yet

Cryptonomist is the one outlet that flags the obvious gap directly: "Ripple's announcement does not name any customers running the MPP integration commercially, and no payment volume figures have been disclosed for that specific feature." The software, per KuCoin, "is still in testing."

The broader claims about how much money is actually moving through these systems don't line up cleanly across sources, either. Crypto Briefing puts x402's throughput at 75 to 120 million transactions in recent months, worth tens of millions of dollars. A separate press release distributed by openpr.com cites the x402 Foundation's own figures of about 75 million payments worth roughly $24 million over a 30-day period. Those aren't necessarily contradictory, but they're not the same claim either, and neither has been independently verified here.

That openpr.com piece is worth flagging on its own terms. It uses the Ripple/x402 story as a lead-in to promote an unrelated presale token called AlphaPepe, complete with specific price points and fundraising totals for that separate project. That's a paid promotional placement, not independent reporting on Ripple's kit, and its numbers on AlphaPepe shouldn't be read as verified facts about anything Ripple did.

The actual test ahead

Ripple's pitch is straightforward: give developers building on either major machine-payment standard a way to settle in XRP or RLUSD, and let adoption sort out which protocol wins. Being a Stripe, Coinbase and Mastercard-adjacent player across multiple emerging standards is a real position to be in.

What's not established yet is demand. No named business has said it's running MPP payments through Ripple's kit in production. The stablecoin session feature is stuck behind a ledger upgrade with no announced timeline. Whether AI agents actually start settling real invoices in XRP, rather than the dollar-pegged stablecoins that already dominate this space, according to CoinDesk's own prior reporting, remains the open question nobody in this batch of coverage has answered.