Will AI Provide a Boost for XRP? The XRP Blockchain Ledger Just Hit 14 Million in AI Agent Transactions.
Key Points
AI agents operating on the XRP Ledger have performed more than 14 million transactions to date.
That hasn't resulted in much of a difference for holders so far.
Agent transactions on this network probably won't be economically meaningful to investors for quite some time, if ever.
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Today, at least a few artificial intelligence agents are sending money and making payments on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), but so far, it hasn't done much for XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) holders. As of Oct. 27, there were 14.6 million agent payments on the chain, which, as a group, were worth just $33,506.
If AI use in finance keeps growing, that sum might be just the start. But does that mean XRP holders will get some upside from it in the future, assuming agentic payments go big?
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One service accounted for 71% of the network's agent payments
The payments AI agents have sent so far on the XRPL are worth around a fifth of a penny per transaction -- hardly anything to write home about.
One service in particular, the Heurist Inference Router, was responsible for 10.4 million of those payments, or 71%, billed in Ripple's own Ripple USD stablecoin. RippleX's engineering lead, J. Ayo Akinyele, is aiming for 100 million payments made by AI agents (though he specified no time frame for that), and additionally claims that around 25% of transactions on the ledger are made by agents today.
But that last claim can't be verified due to the lack of sufficiently comprehensive public data on the subject. Still, Akinyele's target implies that the network will continue to work to attract agent activity.
Do AI agents have a reason to use XRP instead of the alternatives?
On that topic, there's more than one reason to be skeptical that XRP holders will see the benefit of agents onboarding to the XRPL.
As of Oct 27, 195.2 million payments totaling $42.2 million were settled on other blockchains. That means XRPL's market share is quite small.
What's more, AI agent developers tend to go where the users, tooling, and dollars are already located. And in the crypto world, that means Ethereum is a far more attractive place to do business, both as a developer and as an AI agent.
Holders of XRP would also need a mechanism to get upside, and the only one they have, fee burns, is negligible. Agents paying in RLUSD need XRP only for fees, which are practically nonexistent. All 14.6 million in agent payments on the XRP Ledger so far have destroyed only about 146 XRP, or $193; the coin's market cap is $83.3 billion, which is to say it's far too large to be budged whatsoever by this degree of activity.
A few years from now, it's still faintly possible that AI agents could force XRP's price higher. But for that to happen, a lot more of that activity would need to require holding or burning XRP itself, so don't load up on this coin expecting it.
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Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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