Ripple shipped version 1.1 of its XRPL AI Starter Kit on September 15, adding support for two emerging cross-chain agent standards: the Open Wallet Standard and the Machine Payments Protocol co-authored by Stripe and Tempo. The update gives developers new tools to let AI agents hold funds and settle payments in XRP and RLUSD without a human approving each transaction.
RippleX head of product Jazzi Cooper framed the release around distribution rather than a single technical feature.
"Our job is to make XRP and RLUSD first-class options wherever developers are building," Cooper wrote on X. "Let's meet developers where they are."
Agentic payments will be multi-platform and multi-rail. Our job is to make XRP and RLUSD first-class options wherever developers are building.
— Jazzi Cooper (@jazzicoop) September 16, 2026
The latest XRPL AI Starter Kit expands support for the open standards developers are converging on: Open Wallet Standard, MPP from Tempo…
Why Ripple is backing two standards instead of one
Ripple added support for x402, a separate web payments standard, back in June. Rather than choosing between x402 and MPP, the company is now supporting both. According to Ajit Kulkarni's RippleX developer post, that pattern is deliberate:
"XRPL isn't building agentic payments in isolation. It's showing up in the standards the rest of the agent ecosystem is converging on, and giving developers reference implementations for each."
The Open Wallet Standard addresses a specific pain point in agent development. Instead of an agent's private keys scattered across separate config files for each blockchain it touches, OWS keeps everything in a single encrypted vault, decrypted only long enough to sign a transaction before being wiped from memory. With v1.1, a single ows wallet create command now derives an XRPL address alongside every other chain OWS supports.
OWS counts contributors from PayPal, Circle, and the Solana Foundation, according to the RippleX post, which places XRPL inside a wallet infrastructure standard with backing well beyond Ripple's own ecosystem. That contributor list matters because it signals OWS is positioned as neutral, chain-agnostic infrastructure rather than a tool built by any single blockchain to lock developers into its own stack. XRPL's inclusion means developers already using OWS for other chains gain XRPL support without writing any XRPL-specific key management code, which lowers the switching cost for teams that had no prior reason to build on Ripple's ledger.
How the payment channel mechanic actually works for AI agents
The MPP integration supports two payment modes. Single charge payments in XRP, IOU, and MPT settle in 3 to 5 seconds with sub-cent fees whenever a service returns an HTTP 402 status demanding payment before delivering a resource. The more significant addition is session payments through XRPL Payment Channels, which let an agent open a channel once, stream signed vouchers off-chain as it consumes a service, and have the provider settle the total in a single on-chain transaction at the end.
According to the RippleX post, vouchers in this system can be signed at rates exceeding 100,000 per second, verified locally by the provider with no blockchain call required, and an entire session costs only two on-chain transactions regardless of how many individual payments occurred within it.
This channel-based approach solves a cost problem that would otherwise make micropayments for AI agents impractical. If an agent needed to submit a separate blockchain transaction for every single API call, even sub-cent fees would accumulate meaningfully across thousands of calls, and network congestion from that transaction volume would slow settlement for every other user on the chain. Payment channels sidestep this by keeping the high-frequency negotiation entirely off-chain, using cryptographic signatures the provider can verify without touching the ledger at all, and only writing to the blockchain twice per session. Traditional card networks cannot replicate this because they were built for human-paced commerce, where a person authorizes a handful of transactions per day rather than an agent executing hundreds per minute.
Stablecoin support for these session channels is still pending. The XRPL is tracking the required upgrade as XLS-93d, which will let RLUSD-denominated payments follow the same lock-stream-settle pattern XRP already uses.
Where XRP and RLUSD sit against dollar-stablecoin competitors
The release lands the same week Circle's rival Arc mainnet launched, backed by BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard as validators, a signal that competing stablecoin issuers are racing toward the same agentic payments niche Ripple is now targeting. That timing places XRP and RLUSD directly inside a market where USDC-based rails already have a head start in developer mindshare.
Ripple's decade of cross-border bank settlement relationships, built as an alternative to the SWIFT messaging network banks have used since the 1970s, gives the company an existing distribution channel that agent-payment competitors building from scratch do not have. Whether that institutional relationship base translates into developer adoption for a fundamentally different use case, machine-to-machine micropayments rather than bank-to-bank settlement, remains untested. Neither Stripe nor Tempo has disclosed adoption numbers for MPP, and Ripple's own announcement names no commercial customers currently using the integration.
The kit also ships xrpl-up, a local CLI that spins up a sandboxed XRPL node with instant ledger closes and pre-funded accounts, letting developers test payment flows without hitting public Testnet faucet rate limits or waiting through the network's roughly four-second consensus time. A Claude Code plugin lets developers create test accounts or check balances by describing what they want in plain language rather than memorizing CLI flag syntax.
The XRPL has processed 5.6 million x402 transactions since that standard's June launch, according to the RippleX post, though no comparable volume figures exist yet for the newly added MPP integration, which remains in beta.
Kristian Koch
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