XRP and RLUSD Power New AI Economy After XRPL’s Latest Big Update

The Starter Kit will allow developers to build autonomous payment apps powered by XRP and RLUSD.

AI agents have begun completing complicated tasks, including transacting on their own by paying for services or purchasing computing power, all of which is far superior to AI’s early methods of generating texts, images, or simple code.

Ripple wants to have a bigger role, and its latest update, published earlier this week, explains how its native tokens could be at the forefront.

XRP, RLUSD to Power AI

In an attempt to position itself at the center of this emerging machine-to-machine economy, the new update to the XRP Ledger ecosystem, called AI Starter Kit, serves as a suite of tools designed to help developers build autonomous payment apps powered by Ripple’s two tokens, XRP and RLUSD.

The announcement reads that the new product line will allow developers to build such AI agents capable of making and receiving payments through the XRPL. It includes support for X402-powered payments, allowing agents to pay for API access, AI model inference, cloud computing resources, and other digital services using either XRP or RLUSD.

Ripple tries to differentiate itself from other blockchain networks that rely mainly on variable transaction fees and smart contract execution. Instead, XRPL provides settlement finality within 3-5 seconds, predictable transaction costs, and built-in payment functionality.

Developers are aware of the transaction costs in advance, while the AI agents can complete transfers without dealing with gas fee auctions or uncertain settlement times.

The announcement added that XRPL’s native decentralized exchange could be particularly attractive to most devs. An AI agent can send RLUSD while the recipient receives XRP (or vice versa), with a single transaction. The conversion is handled directly by the protocol.

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Safety First

Ripple believes its enhanced levels of security are another major selling point. The XRP Ledger has operated continuously for 14 years without transaction rollbacks, while its protocol-level payment system removes many of the smart contract risks that have led to billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency exploits across many different projects.

The first phase of the new starter kit will include documentation access through AI assistants such as Claude, wallet and payment tools for agent-based apps, and support for the X402 protocol following a collaboration with t54.