Addresses, Key Pairs, and Cryptography

How XRP Ledger accounts, addresses, and signing keys work under the hood.

Accounts and addresses

Every XRP Ledger account is identified by an address — a string, typically starting with "r," derived cryptographically from the account's public key. This address is what you share to receive funds, and what appears in block explorers when looking up account activity.

Two address formats

The XRPL has historically supported two address representations:

• Classic addresses — the original format, an address alone, with any additional payment context (like a destination tag) specified as a separate field.
• X-addresses — a newer format that encodes the destination tag directly into the address string itself, reducing the risk of a sender correctly copying an address but forgetting to separately include a required destination tag — a common and costly mistake, particularly when sending to an exchange.

Both formats refer to the exact same underlying account; which one a given wallet or service displays is a presentation choice, not a difference in the account itself.

Key pairs

Access to an account is controlled by a cryptographic key pair:

• A private key (or the seed/recovery phrase it's derived from), which must be kept secret and is used to sign (authorize) transactions.
• A public key, mathematically derived from the private key, from which the account's address is generated, and which anyone can use to verify that a transaction was genuinely signed by the corresponding private key.

Supported signing algorithms

The XRPL supports two cryptographic signing schemes for account keys: the widely used secp256k1 curve (the same one Bitcoin uses) and Ed25519, a newer, generally faster and simpler curve increasingly favored for new implementations. Either can be used to generate a valid XRPL account key pair; the ledger itself doesn't favor one over the other for basic account operations.

Regular keys: rotating access without changing your address

The XRPL supports assigning an account a regular key — a secondary key pair authorized to sign transactions on the account's behalf, separate from its original "master key." This allows an account holder to rotate their active signing key (for example, after suspecting the original key may have been exposed) without changing the account's address, and optionally to disable the original master key entirely once a regular key is set up, if desired.

Why this matters for security

Understanding the distinction between your address (public, safe to share) and your private key or seed phrase (secret, never to be shared) is the single most important security concept for any XRPL user — see Wallet Security Best Practices for how this plays out in practice, and Advanced Account Features for how multi-signing extends this single-key model to require multiple approvals.