Machine payments
Plain definition. Machine payments are machine-to-machine payments, such as an AI agent paying for an API call or AI model inference with no human in the loop.
Technical definition. The XRP Ledger documentation describes X402 as an open protocol for HTTP-native machine-to-machine payments that extends the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code into a complete payment flow: a service responds with its payment requirements, a client fulfills them with an on-chain transaction, and the service delivers the resource. On the XRP Ledger the flow involves a merchant, a payer agent and a facilitator. The agent submits a presigned XRP Ledger Payment transaction to the merchant, gets a signed receipt from the facilitator after it verifies the on-chain payment, and re-sends the original request with that receipt in the X-PAYMENT header, paying in XRP or RLUSD.
On this site
On this site, Machine payments comes up in Can AI agents and machines pay with XRP? and What does the public evidence show about what drives XRP’s price?.
Source
Agentic Payments with X402 on the XRP Ledger (xrpl.org), read October 1, 2026.