Use of XRP in artificial intelligence (AI) agent payments on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) has risen sharply, while trading in Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD has declined. In an environment where AI automatically selects payment methods, XRP has begun to be used first on the back of speed and fee competitiveness, the article said.

U.Today, a blockchain outlet, reported on July 9 that XRP usage in AI agent payments on XRPL rose 77 percent while RLUSD trading volume fell 32 percent. The market views this as a shift in AI-based automated payment flows from RLUSD to XRP.

The change coincided with a surge in transactions on the financial protocol ClawBank. A total of 7,630 transactions were processed over the past 24 hours across 67 services connected to ClawBank. Given cumulative volume had been 8,469 transactions, activity equivalent to about 90 percent of the entire transaction history occurred in a single day.

Most transactions used XRP as the payment method. Behind this is the x402 protocol, which supports AI agent payments. The protocol is designed to automatically choose the optimal payment asset between XRP and RLUSD in machine-to-machine transactions such as data purchases or computing resource rentals.

Current statistics show a tendency for AI agents to choose XRP first as network load increases. The system is seen as judging XRP’s low, fixed fees and fast processing speed as key reasons.

RLUSD trading volume, by contrast, fell 32 percent over the same period. This has been interpreted as showing a structure taking shape in which stablecoins continue to serve a store-of-value role while XRP handles actual repetitive operational payments. RLUSD, pegged to the dollar, is seen as playing more of a holding-asset role, while frequent small machine-to-machine payments are handled by the native token XRP.

The change also coincides with a period of rapid growth in the XRPL-based AI economy. Cumulative AI-related transactions processed on XRPL have now exceeded 1 million.

Most transactions occurred in AI infrastructure services. The service with the most transactions was Heurist Mesh, a DePIN network providing decentralised GPU resources, which processed about 405,000 transactions. The AI operating system LucyOS followed with nearly 360,000 transactions.

The market sees this flow as an early signal of which asset will settle in as the actual payment method in the XRPL-based AI economy. The fact that AI agents chose XRP by prioritising speed and cost efficiency in an environment where they select payment assets themselves is being taken as a meaningful change for the future expansion of AI services.

A key point to watch is whether this payment pattern persists if the scale of AI-based commerce grows further. If the current flow continues, the possibility is being raised that XRP, rather than stablecoins, could establish itself as the core payment method in the AI agent economy within the XRPL ecosystem.