Circle Internet Group, Inc.Circle launched its own payments blockchain Arc the day before Ripple's Stripe integration, intensifying competition in agent payments.

Ripple has integrated the XRP Ledger into Stripe's agent payment flow through the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, a standard Stripe co-authored with the payments blockchain Tempo. The integration, announced September 17, 2026, arrives via version 1.1 of Ripple's XRPL AI Starter Kit, which adds MPP and Open Wallet Standard support, and it runs on XRP rather than Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin because RLUSD is an issued token that cannot yet support payment channels, the mechanism that lets an agent stream more than 100,000 off-chain vouchers per second and settle with just two on-chain transactions. Extending channels to issued tokens would require a future XRPL upgrade that Ripple has not scheduled. The kit remains in beta with no live commercial volume, and no merchants on Stripe's platform have routed a session through it, while Circle launched its own payments blockchain, Arc, the day before Ripple's announcement. As of September 18, XRP traded at $1.32, up 16.97% over the past month but down 4.66% over the past week.
Circle Internet Group, Inc.Circle launched its own payments blockchain Arc the day before Ripple's Stripe integration, intensifying competition in agent payments.
Ripple's XRPL AI Starter Kit v1.1 adds MPP and Open Wallet Standard support, integrating the XRP Ledger into Stripe's agent payment flow.
Stripe co-authored the MPP standard and its agent payment flow is the integration target, but no merchants have routed a session through it.