u/max-avery

Jake Claver did an interview with John Deaton and published some insights on the schwab situation: https://www.jakeclaver.com/john-deaton-xrp-case-crypto-legislation-linqto-update/

JPM Collateral Ops, acting for Fidelity Capital Markets, pledged $10M of initial margin to U.S. Bank. Half was Fidelity's Treasury Digital Fund (FYOXX) on u/hedera & half was a JPMorgan fund on Ethereum, and both legs settled inside a single workflow with Ownera's FinP2P routing across the two chains.

The tri-party custodian was replaced by a collateral control contract, so segregation and release sat in code instead of an operations procedure. U.S. Bank could see the position on-chain the whole time without being able to seize it unilaterally.

The custodian was simulated, so this is a test and not a live settlement. What it shows is Fidelity's fund sitting on Hedera inside an institutional margin workflow, next to Ethereum, with both chains handled under one instruction

The XRP Ledger has now cleared more than 1,000,000 agentic payments through x402. The milestone lands alongside the debut of the XRP Ledger AI Hub, a platform meant to connect developers, users and projects building AI apps on the network.

The number matters less than what's behind it. These are AI agents paying each other on-chain: software buying compute, calling APIs, running inference and settling up with no person clicking approve. The x402 protocol reuses the old HTTP status code 402, "Payment Required," so bots can pay one another directly for compute or data, dropping the manual wallet management and API-key juggling out of the loop.

This has been building for weeks. On June 10, Ripple shipped the XRP Ledger AI Starter Kit, the infrastructure that lets autonomous agents pay for services and fees in XRP and Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD through x402. A contribution from partner t54 made XRPL a supported chain inside the protocol, so agents could transact for API calls and inference on day one.

Why XRPL for this? A few reasons that actually hold up. Transactions confirm or expire with deterministic finality, so an agent doesn't sit in an ambiguous pending state; it either has its answer or it doesn't. Settlement lands in 3 to 5 seconds, and costs are known up front, with no gas auctions or fee estimation, which is exactly what an agent needs when it's doing its own budget accounting. There's also a protocol-native DEX, so a single transaction can send RLUSD and deliver XRP at the other end with no external bridge or swap contract.

The activity is real, not just a counter ticking up. Reports show 121 active merchants, with Heurist Mesh, LucyOS and AskSurf accounting for a lot of the volume.

As AI systems get more autonomous, the rails they pay on start to matter as much as the models. A model can decide what to do, but it still needs a way to pay for the resources to do it. That's the gap x402 and networks like the XRP Ledger are trying to close, and a million payments in says the idea has moved past the whiteboard.

Source:

https://x.com/i/status/2074905664338411847

https://ripple.com/ripple-press/ripple-receives-full-eu-mica-casp-license/