Ripple backs Mastercard push into machine payments

Ripple has joined Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines programme, placing its XRP Ledger and RLUSD stablecoin within a new effort to build payment rails for AI agents and other autonomous software systems that can transact without manual intervention.

The move links one of the best-known blockchain payments companies with a global card network seeking to define how machine-to-machine commerce should work as artificial intelligence systems begin buying data, computing power, logistics services and digital tools on behalf of businesses. Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, or AP4M, on 10 June as a service designed to make automated transactions permissioned, orchestrated and settled at machine speed across its network.

The programme is aimed at high-frequency, low-value payments, including transactions worth fractions of a cent, where traditional point-of-sale systems are poorly suited. Mastercard says the service supports credentialing, permissioning, transaction routing and settlement across multiple payment types, including cards, bank accounts and stablecoins. More than 30 participants and supporters are involved at launch, including Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout. com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Global Payments, OKX, Polygon, Solana Foundation, Stripe, Tempo and Ripple.

For Ripple, participation gives its institutional blockchain infrastructure a place in an emerging segment of digital commerce where payment speed, auditability and compliance controls are expected to matter as much as transaction cost. The company’s role centres on the XRP Ledger and Ripple USD, known as RLUSD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed to maintain a one-to-one value with the US dollar and issued on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum.

Markus Infanger, senior vice-president of RippleX, said autonomous agents were already settling invoices and paying for computing resources, but institutions could only move at that pace if controls moved with them. He said XRPL and RLUSD were built so enterprises could let agents transact at machine speed within rules enforced on-chain, with settlement in seconds, predictable costs, programmable compliance and a full audit trail.

The announcement follows Mastercard’s 3 June move to expand settlement capabilities to include regulated stablecoins, intraday settlement, weekend processing and holiday settlement options. That plan listed Ripple’s RLUSD alongside Circle’s USDC, Paxos-issued PYUSD, USDG and USDP, and SoFiUSD, with supported blockchain networks including Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and XRPL. The sequence shows Mastercard building a broader settlement framework in which stablecoins are treated as one option within regulated payment infrastructure rather than a parallel system outside it.

Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, said Agent Pay for Machines could create conditions for a “superbloom” of AI business models by allowing services to be bought and sold among agents at very high volumes, very small values, very fast speeds and low latency. The company has framed AP4M as an extension of its earlier Agent Pay work, which focused on trusted AI agents participating in payments, while AP4M targets continuous background transactions between systems.

The business cases being tested include digital services that charge by usage, AI agents buying data from websites, logistics systems paying for freight services and warehouse access, and enterprise software agents coordinating payments across multiple providers. These examples reflect a shift from single, user-initiated transactions towards chains of automated purchases triggered by one instruction, such as building an online shop, arranging a shipment or sourcing cloud resources.

The timing is significant for stablecoin issuers and payments groups. The stablecoin market is now above $315bn, with dollar-linked tokens dominating liquidity in crypto markets and gaining attention from banks, fintech companies and treasury teams seeking faster settlement. Institutional adoption, however, still depends on reserve quality, redemption rights, sanctions controls, cyber security, dispute handling and clear regulatory treatment.

Ripple has positioned RLUSD as an enterprise-grade stablecoin fully backed by segregated reserves of cash and cash equivalents, redeemable one-to-one for US dollars, with availability dependent on jurisdiction. BNY was named in 2025 as primary reserve custodian for RLUSD, reinforcing Ripple’s effort to market the token to regulated institutions rather than only crypto-native users.

Mastercard’s partnership model suggests the company is trying to avoid a closed standard for agentic commerce. AP4M brings together payment processors, stablecoin issuers, blockchain networks, custody firms, identity providers and developer platforms, reflecting the view that machine payments will require common rules for authorisation, spending limits, traceability and liability.