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REF · 01.02 / Introduction

What Is the XRP Ledger?

An introduction to the XRP Ledger (XRPL), the decentralized blockchain that XRP runs on.

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a decentralized, public blockchain that has been running continuously since it launched in June 2012, making it one of the oldest blockchains still in active use. It is maintained by an open-source community of developers, companies, and independent validator operators rather than by any single organization.

Core design goals

The XRPL was designed from the outset around a specific set of priorities that differ somewhat from Bitcoin's or Ethereum's original design goals:

  • Speed and finality. Ledgers close roughly every three to five seconds, and once closed, transactions in that ledger are final — there is no probabilistic finality or need to "wait for confirmations" the way there is on proof-of-work chains.
  • Low, predictable cost. Transaction fees are tiny and are burned rather than paid out to a miner or validator, which removes the fee-market dynamics that can make other networks expensive during congestion.
  • Payments-first feature set. Many of the ledger's native features — trust lines, the built-in decentralized exchange, escrow, payment channels — are purpose-built around moving and exchanging value, rather than being general-purpose smart contract primitives bolted on afterward.
  • Energy efficiency. Because consensus does not depend on competitive computation (as in proof-of-work) or capital-weighted staking rewards in the traditional sense, the XRPL's energy footprint per transaction is very small.

How it works, in brief

The XRPL is secured by the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol, in which a network of independent validators — servers running the rippled software — agree on the exact set and order of transactions to include in each new ledger version. This happens through a voting process rather than a competitive mining race. See Unique Node List and Validators for how validators are selected and trusted.

Accounts on the ledger can hold XRP directly, and — through trust lines — can also hold IOUs representing other currencies or assets issued by other accounts. This is what allows the ledger to support tokenized assets, stablecoins, and its own built-in exchange without needing a separate smart-contract layer for basic issuance and trading.

What can be built on the XRPL

Governance and upgrades

The XRPL's rules can only change through the amendment process: a proposed protocol change must be supported by a supermajority (80%) of trusted validators, sustained continuously for two weeks, before it activates. This deliberately slow, consensus-gated process means no single company — including Ripple — can unilaterally change how the ledger works.