XRP Ledger passes 13M x402 AI payments, RippleX says

The XRP Ledger has processed more than 13 million AI-driven payments through the x402 protocol, RippleX head of engineering J. Ayo Akinyele said on October 10, 2026, putting agentic activity at roughly a quarter of ledger activity, according to Crypto.news. Akinyele cited 166 registered x402 merchants in the same update.

Former Ripple product lead Chandler Fang, a co-founder of t54, responded that automated payments on the network are compounding faster than most expected, a point also covered by U.today.

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From one million to thirteen million in three months

Growth has been steep since the ledger’s first million agentic payments in July. Akinyele wrote that 100 million automated payments “might actually come sooner than we expect” — a forecast rather than a committed target or deadline, as Crypto.news noted, and neither Ripple nor t54 has set a date for reaching it.

Fang pointed to the same July-to-October jump as evidence the trend is accelerating. His view of the next phase: more real-world merchants and services coming onchain, with agents paying in XRP or RLUSD and settling on the XRP Ledger through t54’s x402 facilitator, which checks whether payment is required, submits the transaction and confirms settlement before a service responds. He named no specific merchant partnership and no transaction target.

Also readXRP Wallet Count Passes 8.2 Million, Up From 5 Million in 2024

U.today reported Akinyele’s merchant figure as more than 160 x402 merchants, while his own post and the later tracker gave 166 and 168 registered merchants respectively.

Settlement values stay small

Transaction counts and transferred value are different measures, and the reported settlement totals show the gap. The 13 million-plus payments corresponded to about 6,982 XRP and 12,010 RLUSD, and the dashboard does not establish how much activity came from independent businesses, repeated automated requests or test applications. Earlier research cited by Crypto.news found roughly 1.4 million agentic payments in July with estimated fees near $280.

Ripple’s developer documentation describes x402 as suited to frequent small payments. The ledger generally settles in three to five seconds, and the protocol uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required response so an application can request payment before granting access. Developers can also choose between native XRP, whose market value moves with trading, and RLUSD, which is designed to hold a value of one U.S. dollar and requires a trust line with the issuer before an account can hold or receive it.

Why it matters

The figures show automated payments moving from a trial phase to a repeatable pattern on one of the older public blockchains. If businesses adopt the model, developers gain a reason to build services that charge per request instead of through subscriptions. The near-term test is commercial rather than technical: transaction volume carries little meaning for XRP holders or Ripple’s business unless those small payments come from merchants and applications that keep using the network.

What to watch

The XRPL AI Hub tracker remains the concrete data point, since it already moved past 13.6 million transactions after the October 10 report. Whether new merchant integrations follow, and whether t54’s facilitator becomes the standard settlement path, will determine if the 100 million figure Akinyele floated becomes a milestone rather than a projection. None of this is financial advice, and crypto markets are volatile and uncertain.

Sources: crypto.news, U.today