AI Agent Payments: Inside t54, The Ripple-Backed Trust Layer

LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 03: In this photo illustration, the home page for the OpenAI “ChatGPT” app is displayed on a laptop screen on February 03, 2023 in London, England.Getty Images”Why I never feel anxious or nervous or concerned when I’m deciding to put two million dollars into Chase bank account,” Chandler Fang said on the On The Margin podcast. He had just done exactly that, walking into a branch with a chunk of his investors’ money. Crypto does not feel like that to him. “When I try to put two million dollar into a crypto wallet or maybe a cold wallet, to some degree, I feel nervous. I need to double check, I need to triple check,” he said.Fang quit Ripple to build a company around that gap, for a customer that barely existed a few years ago: the AI agent that spends your money. His startup, t54 Labs, raised $5 million in a seed round co-led by Anagram, PL Capital and Franklin Templeton, with strategic backing from Ripple, Virtuals Ventures and Blockchain Coinvestors, The Block reported. Founded in San Francisco in early 2025, it calls itself a “trust layer for the agentic economy.””The entire society is a trust business,” Fang said. “To some degree you need to build up your own reputation and make sure that the people around you trust your expertise, trust your experience, trust your moral standards.”The problem nobody built forSay you tell ChatGPT to buy you a cheeseburger. The agent has to pick a merchant, an order and a price, and getting any of it wrong costs someone money.”You go for, I don’t know, Cheesecake Factory to buy a cheeseburger, which it doesn’t exist,” Fang said. Then there is the merchant, suddenly hearing from software that claims to act for someone it has never met.”Maybe from a merchant perspective, their first reaction is, who are you? Who are you representing for? Because you said you are representing for Ivan, but how can you verify that?” Fang said. If nobody can, the human owner just disputes the charge later. “Someone took my money and ordered something I don’t need. I want my money back. All those things are losses,” he said.None of this was a problem before, because nobody designed payments for non-humans. “You’re quickly gonna realize because our entire financial ecosystem was primarily human-centric,” Fang said. “It’s primary based on human make the decision, human deliver the services, human do the contact.”t54 is not a payments company, and not an agent company, Fang said. The money still moves over Visa, Ripple or another rail. t54 sells the layer around it: identity it brands “know your agent,” a real-time engine that flags suspicious activity before funds move, agent credit lines, and products called x402-secure and an XRPL x402 facilitator. The company says it has processed more than 20 million transaction records.A crowded, hyped, mostly broken fieldThe agents-plus-money bet is crowded, and a lot of it does not work yet.Louis, who co-founded a Stripe-backed payments startup, said on the On The Margin podcast that most of the category is theater. “We’ve seen a bunch of hype videos of agentic credit card companies launched recently and none of them actually work,” he said. “You’ll notice that all of the hype videos are clipped before you actually buy something.”Nitya Subramanian, who runs the wallet-infrastructure firm Para, said on the On The Margin podcast that delegation always carries a cost. “Agents are like fundamentally about outsourcing a purchase, and anyone who has ever outsourced a purchase knows that this comes with trade-offs,” she said. Her fix is hard limits. “I could create a stable coin backed card and give it $200 a week and just have it buy Chipotle. So it’s only allowed to buy my Chipotle bowl every day,” she said.The prize, in her telling, is worth the scramble. “The last time we had a new financial rail was probably credit cards in the 70s,” Subramanian said. “It’s probably the most exciting time in many of our, if not most of our careers to be building in either FinTech or crypto.”Why Ripple and Franklin Templeton wrote checksOne of crypto’s most valuable companies and one of the world’s largest asset managers do not usually fund a day-zero startup. Fang had spent years inside the system first: quant trader at J.P. Morgan, then the bank’s blockchain-payments team, Onyx, around 2019, then Ripple, building cross-border payments on blockchain and stablecoins.”I worked for Ripple for such a long time, there is kind of a mutual trust,” Fang said. He had pitched the idea internally before he left. “It is so obvious that we need some financial infrastructure where we need a lot of agent to get involved in touching money so that they are able to do more valuable tasks for us,” he said.Funding it was cheaper than building it, in his read. Backing “a company that is fast moving and able to take risks and being very innovative,” he said, was “a reasonable decision” for an incumbent.Finance also does not reward people who waltz in. “If you want to take anyone’s custodians, you have to have a multiple license, money transfer license, to move money around,” he said. t54 keeps a compliance advisor with 18 years across the SEC, FDIC and FINRA.And Fang has little patience for founders who think the concept is the hard part. “Not an idea. Idea is cheap,” he said. “Ninety percent of the successful startup are eventually doing something that was not the original idea they plan to do.”The five-year bet”You can imagine five years down the road, maybe thirty percent of your daily transaction was automated by AI agents,” Fang said. He pictures telling your car to reorder toilet paper, or telling an agent to buy your parents a birthday gift under $200 every year.Each of those handoffs is the trust he felt at the Chase counter, aimed at software instead. “Are you willing to trust them?” Fang said. “Would you feel the same situation as I did when I walked into a Chase Bank?”Chase took centuries to earn that reflex. Fang is betting the agentic economy will not give him centuries.



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