AI Agents, Bank Lockouts and XRP: Where Agent Payments Land

In October, America's biggest banks found AI agents logged into their customers' accounts using their customers' own usernames and passwords, and the banks never approved any of them. Some of those agents tried to do things and nobody told them to do, and one even called the bank to complain without asking the account holder first. So, the banks are shutting them out with Morgan Stanley blocking outside agents and JP Morgan, Bank of America, and City restricting them, which means the AI apps that are supposed to pay your bills for you are getting locked out of your bank. But, these agents still need to pay for things. So, if the banks won't let them move money, where does that money go?

And does any of it land on XRP? Well, by the end of this video, you'll know exactly how this new money reaches XRP, the one number that tells you whether it's real yet, and the date America's largest banks get a federal rule book to go after the same kind of money themselves. If you understand that before the dollars get big, that's where the opportunity in this story is. You'll also see what millions of agents' payments on XRP ledger actually add up to. And it all starts with a new app from Meta that's built to look at your bank balance.

So, if you're here to build real wealth, protect what's yours, and be the one to change your family's future, hit the subscribe button and comment bullish below. Now, let's dive into the video.

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Welcome back to the Bull Runners channel. If you're new here, my name is Paul, and you can find me on Twitter or X at Crypto Paul. So, let's start with what one of these agents actually is, because once you see how it gets into an account, you'll understand why the banks moved so fast. An AI agent is a program you handed job to through AI, kind of like through ChatGPT or Claude through Anthropic and now even Muse through meta, which is formerly known as Facebook. These agents do stuff like pay a bill or move your savings to an account with a better rate.

And to do that job, it has to get inside of your accounts. In September, Meta launched a personal agent called Muse and once you link your bank to it, it can see your balances, your transactions, and your investments. Most banks never built a safe way for software to connect to your account. So, the easy way in is to give the agent your username and password. And from that moment, the bank thinks it's you while a program is actually the one making the decisions.

Axios, the news site, broke this on October 22nd and Reuters, the news agency, confirmed with its own sources that the big banks are blocking these agents. And the bank CEOs had already said it on the record starting on JP Morgan's earning call on October 13th when Jamie Dimon, the bank CEO, said JP Morgan isn't going to allow just any outside agent inside the company and you don't want rogue agents.

They can make payments for you. That means you have to give them your bank code. That means they're in your bank. And you're assuming they're going to act properly on your behalf and they may not.

Three days later, Rick Wuesthoff, the CEO of Charles Schwab, which is a brokerage, told Bloomberg TV that Schwab blocks the big agents in the tens and 20s every week and he wants clients using Schwab's own assistant instead. So, JP Morgan won't let an outside agent inside your account and JP Morgan has also been running its own dollar token on a public blockchain since November of 2025. It's called JPMD. It's basically a JP Morgan bank deposit turned into a digital token and it lives on base, which is the DeFi chain from Coinbase, the biggest crypto exchange in America, for JP Morgan's big institutional clients. So, the bank warning loudest about rogue agents has been moving its own dollars on Coinbase's network for almost a year.

JP Morgan clearly has no problem with money moving on a blockchain, which means the banks are shutting these agents out over one question nobody in America can answer yet because things are moving too fast. Now, quick side note before we continue on with the rest of this video. If you click on that very first link down in the description below, or if you're on mobile, tap more and you'll see that link, you can get access to the seven cryptos that we are very bullish on moving forward through this bull market. We have a professional team of DeFi and crypto researchers that screened over 20,000 cryptos and these are the best ones that we're looking at. Go ahead and get access to that right now by clicking on that very first link.

Now, let's get back into the video. So, the banks are shutting AI agents out and nobody can fully answer the question yet about who pays when things go wrong. Let's say an agent makes a bad payment on your account. Well, is the bank at fault for letting them in or are you at fault for using the AI agent? Heck, is the AI provider, like Meta with Muse or even Grok with their bot, held liable?

Well, Madison Mills, the Axios reporter who broke the story, laid out the problem on MS Now, the cable news channel.

We haven't figured out what the regulation should look like and we haven't figured out who's liable just yet. So, for example, if I chose to give my username and password to an agent and then it made a purchase on my behalf, who's liable when I raise my hand and say that wasn't supposed to happen. Is it the merchant that owes me the money back? Is it the bank? Is it the AI company?

The morning after her report ran, the banks are asking the same thing because Bill Demchak, the CEO of PNC, one of the biggest banks in the country, said on his earnings call on October 15th that agents trying to transact inside your account are incredibly unsafe. and I quote that it's not going to happen on my watch and that there are going to have to be laws passed on liability shifting. And until those laws exist, the risk sits with the customer because Jeremy Barnum, JP Morgan's chief financial officer, said on the same call as Diamond that if customers give their login to an agent and it does something they don't want, that's going to be on them. A lot of us have linked some app to a bank account without thinking twice, whether it's a budgeting app or a payment app. Handing a program your login is a 10-second decision that gets very hard to undo once it moves your money you never meant to move. And these agents are doing this all the time.

So the banks are limiting agents to simply looking at your account. And Citi, for example, bars agents from logging in or making transactions and only lets them read an account through approved providers. Because a program that can only look can't actually go and make payments for you or lose money potentially, which means there is no real liability here except for what the AI provider now has in terms of information on your bank accounts. That said, Washington moved a lot faster on the money these agents want to spend. On October 21st, the Office of Comptroller of Currency, otherwise known as the OCC, which is the agency that oversees America's national banks, finalized its rule under the Genius Act.

The new federal law for stablecoins, which are digital tokens built to always be worth $1 pegged directly to the US dollar. And this rule now takes effect on January 18th of 2027. So there's a federal rulebook coming for digital dollars and still nothing for an agent that goes wrong inside of your bank account. [snorts] In the meantime, the agents that need to pay for things are already doing it somewhere nobody asks them for a password. So let's look at how these agents pay for things outside of banks because it works completely different. Now Now, typical online card payment through Stripe, the big payment company, costs 2.9% plus a fixed 30 cents, which is fine on a $50 dinner.

Now, say an agent wants to pay a fraction of a cent for one piece of data thousands of times an hour, and that 30 cent fee alone costs more than the thing it's buying. Then you have to think about a checkout page, which wants your card number and your sign-off every single time, which an agent can't give on its own. So, Coinbase built a standard called X402, which lets a website send the agent a bill in the background, and the agent pays it on the spot from its own crypto wallet, usually in a stablecoin. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, explained in June where he thinks this is heading.

Well, today we typically talk to one agent at a time. But in the future, a lead agent that we're talking to will actually orchestrate hundreds or thousands of other agents, each one specialized to a certain type of task. So, they're going to need to pay each other.

And it's already adding up because Coinbase has said X402 handled more than 165 million payments worth about 50 million combined, which works out to about 30 cents a payment. Mastercard jumped in on June 10th with Agent Pay for Machines, its own system for agents to pay for things, and it launched with more than 30 partners, including Coinbase and Ripple, the company behind XRP. So, outside the banks, agents pay with digital dollars sitting in wallets they control, which is exactly the business that October 21st rule book covers. And Ripple has spent this whole year trying to pull that agent money onto its own network, the XRPL, where agents have made millions of payments, and the money behind them doesn't match that count at all. So, let's look at the XRP ledger, because this is where the agent story touches XRP directly.

In June, Ripple released a starter kit to help developers build agents that pay on the XRP ledger in XRP or RLUSD, which is Ripple's own stablecoin. And those payments run on the same X402 standard that Coinbase built. On July 8th, the XRPL Foundation, which is a non-profit that supports the ledger, said agents had passed their first million X402 payments there. By mid-October, a public dashboard counted more than 14 million of them, with the agents paying about 7,000 XRP and J.A.O. Akinyele, the head engineer at RippleX, said agent payments had become about a quarter of all of the activity on the ledger.

Then you look at how much money all these payments actually moved, and that dashboard put it to about $42,000 in total since the very first one, which works out to less than a third of a cent per payment. And lately, it's been adding under $4,000 each week, which is kind of weird, right? Millions of payments, and all of them together add up to about the price of a decent used car. And since that RLUSD's worth more than that XRP, most of those dollars traveled in Ripple's stablecoin. XRP still gets used, though, because every account on the XRP ledger needs to keep at least one XRP locked up as a reserve just to exist.

And holding RLUSD adds another 0.2 XRP on top of that. And every payment pays a tiny fee in XRP that gets destroyed for good. So, the number that tells you whether this is becoming real for XRP is that weekly dollar figure, because it has to grow a lot before enough agents are opening accounts and burning fees to even matter for the price action of the coin. Now, come January 18th, the biggest banks in America get a federal rulebook for issuing digital dollars of their own. That date matters for your money because it puts the same banks on both sides of this story.

The new law covers national banks and their subsidiaries, and the OCC also supervises JPMorgan's main bank, which means the company keeping outside agents out of your account falls under the rule book for issuing digital dollars starting January 18th with its own token already sitting on Coinbase's network. Either way, we're not too sure what JP Morgan's plan is just yet. It looks like they always want to dominate everywhere they go and keep everyone else out of the game. So, it makes sense that they would lock agents out of their own bank. This is why crypto and more specifically blockchains are so important for the future of agents and finance.

Because when the banks lock the agents out of your account, the money goes into digital dollars in the agents' own wallets. And on the XRP ledger, those dollars mostly travel as RLUSD, which means XRP gets paid through the wallets and the fees that agents need while the dollars running through it are still relatively tiny. And if you ever hand an app your bank login, JP Morgan's own finance chief has already told you whose problem the mistake is. It's yours. So, right now we are at the start of a major revolution where AI agents are going to be running and managing much of our finance.

But right now on the XRP ledger, it's still really small, which means from here probably through January into mid next year, the only thing that's actually going to matter for XRP is the chart. And right now, it does look like we are in a new bull market even with this slight pullback we've experienced recently. Which means one of the best things you can do if you're a firm believer in XRP and crypto as a new sector of the market is to create a game plan for yourself where you're dollar cost averaging over the upcoming 3 to 6 months because it's very much possible we experience far more volatility and potentially new local lows while we still build a new uptrend. Now, if that sounds kind of confusing to you, I'll summarize what I'm stating. I think accumulating right now over the next 6 months on a scheduled plan is a really smart move because we're closer to the bottom than we are the next all-time high.

That said, I'm still a believer in XRP long-term and I still do diversify because the market is growing and expanding and AI coins and real-world asset tokens are really starting to pick up some steam. So, I want to own a piece of several of these networks than bet everything on which coin wins. Either way, we are likely going to experience a bit more volatility here and so if prices drop again, the people who lose the most are the ones who don't have any support or keep a cool level head when things go wrong, which is why I think you should check out our private intelligence network by clicking on that link in the description below where not only will you get a better and clearer picture into the market, but you'll also get access to weekly calls with professionals and coaches, a consistently updated list of new altcoins or cryptos that are likely to perform before it happens and deep and valuable insights into what's going to happen next in the markets. Because ultimately, we know this, crypto is here to stay. That banks are going to own a smaller and smaller piece of the overall market and that the people who are early and have a real plan are going to be the ones that win long-term.

So, if you want to secure your future and your family's financial future while also maintaining total sovereignty over your money, then click on that second link down in the description below to join our private intelligence network. And that is it for the video, folks. If you enjoyed it, be sure to subscribe to the channel and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.

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