RippleX’s head of engineering expects the number of agentic transactions on XRP Ledger to climb rapidly after recently topping 1 million.
"I was very pleased to see the 1 million milestone on XRP Ledger, but I think we’ll blast through 10 million ... [and] may even get to 100 million within the next couple of years given the pace of development with agents and how the infrastructure continues to get better," RippleX Head of Engineering Ayo Akinyele told The Block.
Agentic payments refer to transactions initiated by AI-powered software acting on behalf of humans, rather than payments manually approved one at a time. Crypto companies see an opportunity to provide these agents with digital wallets, allowing them to make programmable payments onchain and around-the-clock without relying on traditional bank accounts or credit cards.
Interest in the technology has intensified as developers envision a world in which AI agents autonomously pay for data, computing power and other services needed to complete assigned tasks.
"The main focus, obviously, is making it frictionless for AI agents to pay for APIs and digital services on XRP Ledger because of the strengths that we offer from a settlement perspective — so, three to five seconds," Akinyele said. "We have predictability in terms of transaction costs, and we’ve been purpose-built for payments from the get-go."
