Ripple Joins x402 Foundation, Giving AI Agents Permission to Spend Like Humans 🤖

Ripple has joined the x402 Foundation as a Premier Member, adding its name to a roster that already includes Coinbase, Circle, Google, and Mastercard, according to an X post by the firm. The foundation focuses on standards for agentic payments, in which autonomous AI agents transact on behalf of users without human input.

"As AI agents begin to take on more of the transaction lifecycle, they'll need a way to pay that's as fast and reliable as the way they already exchange data," Ripple said in the post. The firm added that it had been building that infrastructure on the XRP Ledger, including support for the x402 standard that enables AI agents to settle transactions using XRP and RLUSD.

According to an earlier CoinGape report, Ripple released the XRPL AI Starter Kit in June, giving developers tools to integrate agentic payments with XRP and RLUSD on XRPL. The firm-backed initiative t54.ai has also been cited as an early user of the framework.

The x402 Foundation is organized around the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, repurposed to signal that a digital request can be answered with a crypto payment. Premier members collaborate on specifications, reference implementations and developer tooling for machine-to-machine commerce.

Ripple's addition expands the foundation's payments-industry representation alongside Mastercard, while Google contributes cloud and AI infrastructure and Circle brings its stablecoin expertise. Coinbase is also a Premier Member and provides custody and exchange infrastructure for the group's payment flows.

No financial advice.