The great AmEx partnership with XRP that wasn’t

For months, XRP influencers on X and YouTube have been promising their followers that American Express (AmEx) was about to embrace XRP. The long–awaited announcement finally arrived on March 30.

Turns out, the NFL sponsorship deal with the credit card giant had nothing to do with XRP. Yesterday, AmEx became the Official Payments Partner of the NFL, i.e., for presale tickets, on-site experiences, and game perks.

Not a single mention of Ripple or its blockchain.

The hype had been building for months and reached a crescendo in the hours before the announcement.

The same false promise has resurged in viral waves for years.

A years-long pattern of recycled hype

XRP influencers have forecasted AmExs use of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) an embarrassing number of times.

Months and even years ago, influencers claimed it was “a done deal” with AmEx, attaching diagrams, conference videos, audio clips, and assortments of annotated screenshots.

In January 2025, a leader of the XRP Army told his followers that Garlinghouse had revealed a partnership with AmEx under a non-disclosure agreement.

In March 2025, another influencer posted that AmEx had confirmed manufacturing a crypto card with Ripple.

By July 2025, yet another XRP influencer cited an unattributed infographic claiming AmEx somehow uses XRPL.

On YouTube, dozens of videos promote the same false narrative. Creators repackaged old footage as breaking news.

The American Express announcement has nothing to do with XRP.

The entire mythology traces back to one real event. In November 2017, AmEx and Ripple announced a pilot for cross-border business payments between the US and UK via RippleNet.

Critically, that pilot did not use the XRP coin. Ripples own executive told CNBC at the time, “The technology we have developed, it separated a connection from the cryptocurrency or the token.”

AmEx could use Ripple to exchange value from one fiat currency to another, he explained, “without the need for any intermediate blockchain currency.” Treacher added that XRP “will come into play later on in the evolutionary dynamics and the other players.”

Heres why Ripple XRP partnerships and MoUs often go nowhere

It never did. AmEx never expanded the pilot, adopted XRP, or pursued any deal with Ripple beyond 2017. AmEx has never confirmed any new XRP deal, and the more recent viral claims have been labeled fake and misleading.

Still, the AmEx rumor gained its inception then, and XRP influencers kept recycling it for years.

The XRP engagement economy of nonexistent partnerships

XRP influencers have turned the gap between RippleNet partnerships and actual XRPL usage into a cottage industry.

The pattern is consistent. Influencers cite details about a years-old blockchain pilot, conflate RippleNet with XRP token usage, add ‘breaking’ or ‘just in’ or emergency siren emojis, and collect effortless engagement on social media.

Worse, some posts promoted unrelated tokens alongside the AmEx fiction. One Binance Square user bundled the fake announcement with a promotion for an unrelated token that would allegedly benefit from the non-existent AmEx-XRPL deal.

Protos has previously documented hundreds of Ripple partnership announcements that generated minimal usage of XRP, from MoneyGram to Bhutans central bank.