Chain fees on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) were less than $400 on Wednesday, according to DefiLlama, which tracks fees across major blockchains.
Bithomp, another explorer, estimated users of the blockchain burned 327 XRP over the past 24 hours, confirming the total as worth less than $400.
Expanding the timeframe to a week doesn’t do much to improve the figure. XRPL generated $3,100 in chain fees over the past week, and roughly $16,000 over the past month.
For a sense of scale, Bitcoin users paid miners $183,000 worth of transaction fees yesterday. On the same day, Ethereum generated more than $323,000, while Solana pulled in $358,000.
Tron cleared more than $1 million.
Embarrassingly, the entire trailing 12 months of XRPL chain fees sum to less than a single day at Tron.
A busy network earns almost no fees
To be strictly accurate, XRPL chain fees are burned, a minor distinction from the customary practice of coin payments to miners or validators.
Still, the value of XRP burned to conduct transactions on XRPL is comparable to the value of transaction or chain fees paid to miners or validators on other blockchains.
The explanation for the tiny figure is as simple as it is devastating. Every XRPL transaction destroys a tiny, minimum amount of XRP as an anti-spam measure.
The base cost is 0.00001 XRP, or 10 drops, as the network’s own documentation confirms.
At yesterday’s XRP price near $1.11, that rounds to one thousandth of one cent per transaction.
This contrasts starkly with market-fluctuating, demand-based transaction fees like Bitcoin where chain fees fluctuate in value wildly by day. Indeed, although Bitcoin users typically pay a few hundred thousand dollars worth of daily transaction fees to miners, on a day like April 19, 2024, they paid over $80 million.
On XRPL, fees stay microscopic even when the network is busy. Indeed, the network is quite busy, routinely processing more than a million transactions a day, including many computational, non-payment data requests.
Unfortunately, even an impressive million transactions at the base rate of 10 drops burns just 10 XRP. Run the math at current XRP prices, and a million transactions costs less than $20.
Read more: David Schwartz says don’t invest in Ripple
XRP Ledger fees slow to a trickle
XRPL chain fees are burned, not paid to validators, so no one has any particular motivation to buy XRP on the basis of earning chain fees.
Although burns do reward all token holders equally by reducing supply, their tiny dollar value mostly exists to deter spam.
As a result, the mechanism of chain fees captures only a de minimis measure of the network’s activity, which is dwarfed by its $69 billion market capitalization — almost all of which is speculative investment.
Even by its own low standards, the XRPL is slowing down. Analytics firm Glassnode found that daily fees fell about 89% over the course of 2025.
Last December was “the lowest level seen since December 2020.”
Protos previously documented the same decline from another angle, with active XRP Ledger addresses down 80% during the first half of 2025. The pattern is consistent.
At time of writing, XRP trades at $1.11, down 40% year-to-date and 52% over the past 12 months. The blockchain underneath it earned less than $400 in chain fees yesterday.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
