XRP Ledger
How the XRP Ledger settles a payment
The XRP Ledger was built for one job — moving value — and it shows. A payment is final in three to five seconds, the fee is a fraction of a cent and goes to nobody, and there are no confirmations to count. It is the fastest settlement on this site, and the trade is that it carries almost nothing except its own currency.
Final in one ledger, not twelve blocks
The network closes a new ledger every three to five seconds, and every server that agrees on it marks it validated. Once your payment is in a validated ledger it is done — the result cannot change. That is why this is the only network we list where the confirmation count is 1.
Everywhere else on this site, waiting for depth is how a payment becomes safe to act on: each new block makes an unwind less plausible until the risk stops mattering. The XRP Ledger does not work that way. Consensus settles the exact set of transactions before the ledger is declared valid, so there is no shallow period to survive.
Practically, that collapses two events into one. On Bitcoin you tell a customer their payment arrived and then, minutes later, that it is safe. Here those are the same moment, and it happens while they are still looking at the screen.
A fee that nobody collects
There is no gas here and no fee market to read. Every transaction destroys a small, fixed amount of XRP — the minimum is ten drops, which is one hundred-thousandth of an XRP — and that amount is not paid to a validator, a miner or to us. It is destroyed. The cost exists to make flooding the network expensive, not to pay anyone for including your payment.
The consequence is a fee that behaves like a rounding error rather than a variable you have to price around. It does not climb when the network is busy the way gas does, it does not scale with the amount being sent, and it is small enough that it rarely enters a customer’s decision at all. Your customer pays it on top of your amount; you receive what you invoiced.
What this network carries
One currency, and that is the whole list. Rendered from the live catalogue rather than written here.
- XRPThe network’s own currency
- Six decimal places — the smallest unit is called a drop, and a million of them make one XRP. It moves against your local currency between the moment you quote a price and the moment it settles, the same way Bitcoin does.
There is deliberately no stablecoin in this list, and one absence matters more than the others: there is no USDT on the XRP Ledger. If a customer offers to pay you “USDT on XRP”, something is wrong with the request — check the network before you send an address. For dollar-denominated invoices, use USDC or USDT on Ethereum, Base or Polygon, or USDT on Tron.
Which customers this network fits
Worth it for
- Anything that should feel finished immediately — the customer is still on the page when the payment becomes irreversible.
- Cross-border payments and remittance corridors, which is the use this ledger was designed around.
- Small payments, where a fee of a fraction of a cent genuinely changes what is viable.
Better suited elsewhere
- Prices that must hold their value — there is no stablecoin here, so the amount you invoice is exposed to the market until it settles.
- Customers whose funds already sit on an EVM chain or on Tron; meet the money where it is.
- Anything that needs contracts running around the payment itself.
What to plan for
An address on this ledger has to be switched on before it can hold anything. The network requires every account to keep a base reserve — currently 1 XRP — permanently locked, and an address that has never received that much simply does not exist as an account yet. A payment too small to cover the reserve cannot bring one into being. This is the single biggest difference between XRP and every other network here, where an address is just a number that works the first time anyone sends to it.
The locked reserve is not a fee and it is not gone — it stays yours, it just cannot be spent while the account exists. Note also that most figures you will find online are stale: the base reserve was lowered to 1 XRP in December 2024, down from 10.
The reserve is charged once per address, not once per payment. It attaches to the account rather than to the transaction, so an address that has been activated stays activated and every later payment to it costs nothing extra. What it costs to receive on this ledger depends on how many addresses you receive on, not on how many invoices you issue.
- Exchanges and custodians usually share one address between all of their customers and tell them apart with a destination tag — a number that travels with the payment. If you move received XRP on to an exchange account and leave the tag off, the money arrives at the exchange but nobody knows it is yours, and recovering it means a support ticket rather than a transaction. Paying an ordinary address needs no tag; paying an exchange almost always does.
- Do not accept an offer of USDT on the XRP Ledger. Tether does not issue it here, so whatever is being described is either a different asset or a mistake.
- Once a payment is in a validated ledger it cannot be reversed by anyone, including us. That is the protection against chargebacks, and it is also why an address typed wrong is simply gone.
Questions
How long does an XRP payment take to confirm?
Three to five seconds, and then it is final rather than merely likely. A new ledger closes on that cadence and a payment inside a validated ledger cannot be undone, which is why the confirmation count for this network is 1 instead of the ten or twenty you see elsewhere.
What does it cost to send XRP?
A fixed minimum of ten drops — one hundred-thousandth of an XRP — which is a fraction of a cent. Unusually, that amount is destroyed rather than paid to anyone. There is no validator earning it and no fee auction to win, so the cost does not spike when the network is busy the way gas does.
Why does an XRP address need to be activated?
The ledger charges every account a permanently locked base reserve, currently 1 XRP, to stop anyone creating millions of empty accounts and bloating the ledger for everybody else. Until an address has received at least that much it is not an account, and a smaller payment cannot create one. The reserve stays yours — it is locked, not spent — and it is charged once per address rather than once per payment, so it is a cost of having a place to be paid, not a cost of each invoice.
What is a destination tag and do I need one?
It is a number sent alongside a payment so a business sharing one address between many customers can tell whose money just arrived. Paying a personal or merchant address needs no tag. Sending to an exchange or custodian almost always does, and leaving it off usually means the funds land somewhere real but unattributed, which is a support conversation rather than a lost coin.
Can I accept USDT on the XRP Ledger?
No. Tether does not issue USDT on the XRP Ledger, so an offer to pay you in it is a misunderstanding at best. If you need a dollar-denominated invoice, take USDC or USDT on Ethereum, Base or Polygon, or USDT on Tron.
Why does XRP need only one confirmation when Bitcoin needs several?
They make a payment safe in different ways. Bitcoin buries a transaction under work until rewriting history costs more than the payment is worth, so depth is the safety and more blocks mean more of it. The XRP Ledger agrees on the exact contents of a ledger before declaring it valid, so there is nothing left to bury — the payment is either in a validated ledger or it is not.
How many decimal places does XRP have?
Six. The smallest unit is a drop and one million drops make one XRP, so amounts are always whole numbers of drops underneath. Anything more precise than six places cannot be expressed on this ledger and will be rejected or rounded rather than sent.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of these documents. Each was read on the date shown rather than recalled.
Try the flow with test money first
Create an invoice on a test network, pay it with faucet funds, and watch detection and confirmation arrive as events you can build against — the same pair you will handle in production.
Start free