Chain costs on the $XRP Ledger (XRPL) was below $400 on Wednesday, according to DefiLlama, which tracks fees for major blockchains.
Bithomp, another explorer, estimated that 327 users of the blockchain had been burned $XRP in the last 24 hours, confirming the total is worth less than $400.
Extending the period to one week does not do much to improve the figure. XRPL generated $3,100 in on-chain fees last week, and about $16,000 in the last month.
For a sense of scale, Bitcoin users yesterday paid miners $183,000 in transaction fees. On the same day, Ethereum generated over $323,000, while Solana raked in $358,000.
Tron has cleared more than $1 million.
It’s embarrassing that the entire twelve months of XRPL chain fees add up to less than one day at Tron.
A busy network earns almost no costs
To be strictly accurate, the XRPL chain fees are burned, a slight difference from the usual coin practice payments to miners or validators.
Yet the value of $XRP burned to transact on XRPL is comparable to the value of transaction or chain fees paid to miners or validators on other blockchains.
The explanation for the small figure is as simple as it is devastating. Every XRPL transaction destroys a small, minimum quantity of $XRP as an anti-spam measure.
The base cost is 0.00001 $XRPor 10 drops, as the network’s own documentation confirms.
At yesterday $XRP price near $1.11, which rounds up to one thousandth of a cent per transaction.
This is in stark contrast to market-fluctuating, demand-based transaction fees like Bitcoin, where the value of the chain fee fluctuates wildly on a daily basis. Although Bitcoin users typically pay a few hundred thousand dollars in daily transaction fees to miners, on a day like April 19, 2024, they paid more than $80 million.
On XRPL, costs remain microscopic even when the network is busy. The network is indeed quite busy, routinely processing more than a million transactions per day, including many computational, non-payment data requests.
Unfortunately, even an impressive million transactions with a base rate of 10 drops only burns 10 $XRP. Perform the calculation on the current value $XRP prices, and a million transactions cost less than $20.
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XRPL chain fees are burned and not paid to validators, so no one has a specific motivation to buy $XRP based on earning chain fees.
While burns reward all token holders equally by reducing supply, their small dollar value exists mainly to deter spam.
As a result, the chain fee mechanism represents only a de minimis measure of the network’s activity, dwarfed by its $69 billion market cap – almost all of which are speculative investments.
Even by its own low standards, the XRPL is slowing down. Analytics firm Glassnode found that daily costs fell by about 89% over the course of 2025.
Last December was “the lowest level since December 2020.”
Protos previously documented the same drop from a different angle, with active $XRP Ledger addresses an 80% decline in the first half of 2025. The pattern is consistent.
At the time of writing, $XRP is trading at $1.11, down 40% since the beginning of the year and 52% in the last 12 months. The blockchain underneath earned less than $400 in chain fees yesterday.