Mastercard adds Ripple to Agent Pay for Machines

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines on June 10, a permissioned payments service designed for machine-to-machine transactions conducted by AI agents. Ripple joined more than 30 initial partners, including Coinbase, Stripe and the Solana Foundation.

The service will handle settlements across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins, credential each agent, enforce programmatic spending limits and process transactions worth fractions of a cent.

Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert said, “machine payments could run at far higher volumes and far smaller values than today’s systems.”

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse endorsed a comment by Flare founder Hugo Philion that early criticism of XRP as a “banker coin” reflected timing rather than merit. Garlinghouse amplified the view on X and shared a community image he posted in 2024.

In a company post, Ripple wrote that the XRP Ledger and its stablecoin Ripple USD (RLUSD) are helping to build infrastructure for agent-driven payments. The post notes that autonomous AI agent payments already settle natively on the XRP Ledger using XRP and RLUSD.

At the time of Mastercard’s announcement, XRP traded near $1.11, down about 6% over the prior week. The token’s market capitalization was near $69 billion, ranking it sixth by market value among crypto assets.

Analysts expect stablecoin payment volumes to rise over the next decade. Mastercard has been expanding its crypto team while developing services that support machine-speed transactions.

The partnership places Ripple alongside major payments and crypto firms in Mastercard’s program. Upcoming quarters should produce settlement data that can be compared with on-chain transaction volumes on the XRP Ledger.