What Is XRP?

An overview of XRP, the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, and how it differs from the Ripple company.

XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a decentralized, open-source blockchain that first went live in 2012. XRP is used on the ledger to pay transaction fees, to fund account reserves, and as a bridge asset that can move value between different currencies without either party needing to hold the other's currency directly.

Key characteristics

• Fixed supply. 100 billion XRP were created at the genesis of the ledger. No new XRP can ever be mined or issued — the supply only ever decreases, because a small amount is permanently destroyed ("burned") with every transaction.
• Fast settlement. Transactions on the XRP Ledger typically finalize in three to five seconds.
• Low cost. A standard transaction costs a tiny, dynamically-adjusted fee (a fraction of a cent under normal network conditions), paid in XRP.
• Not mined. Unlike Bitcoin or (pre-Merge) Ethereum, XRP does not use proof-of-work mining or proof-of-stake validation to secure new transactions. The ledger instead relies on the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol, a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement process run by independent validators.

What XRP is used for

• Bridge currency for payments. Ripple's payment network uses XRP as an optional bridge asset so a payment provider does not need to pre-fund accounts in every destination currency.
• Settling value on the XRP Ledger. Any application built on the XRPL — token issuance, the built-in decentralized exchange, NFTs, or the AMM — ultimately settles in XRP for network fees and reserves.
• General-purpose crypto asset. Like other major cryptocurrencies, XRP is also held, traded, and used as collateral or a store of value by individuals and institutions, independent of any specific payment use case.

XRP is not a company

A common point of confusion: XRP is not issued by, owned by, or under the direct control of Ripple, the company. Ripple is a private fintech company that uses XRP in some of its products and holds a large amount of XRP, but the XRP Ledger and the XRP asset exist independently of Ripple and would continue to operate even if Ripple ceased to exist. See XRP vs. XRPL vs. Ripple for a full breakdown of this distinction, which matters a great deal both technically and legally.