Who actually uses the XRP Ledger?

01 · The busiest account on the ledger

Thirteen million orders in a month, and almost none of them traded

On the XRP Ledger there is an account that placed nearly 13 million orders in August. It worked every day of the month, about five orders every second, and never stopped for long. Almost none of them did anything. Out of nearly 13 million transactions, 882 ended in a trade.

That one account was a sixth of everything the ledger did that month. It paid about the price of a phone in fees to do it.

The XRP Ledger is a public blockchain that opened in 2012, two years before Ethereum. It settles in about four seconds, costs a fraction of a cent to use, and was built for one job: moving money between banks without the chain of other banks that normally sits in the middle. It has its own coin, XRP, one of the most valuable in crypto. Ripple, the company that built the ledger, still holds a large part of the supply and releases it on a schedule.

Bitquery indexes every XRP Ledger transaction from the first block in January 2013. We counted all of them, then counted the accounts behind them, then went through what those accounts hold, what they send, what the messages attached to their payments say, and how many of them ever come back. This ledger has settled more traffic than Ethereum, and it did so with a crowd that would fit in a football stadium. The features Ripple built for banks have user counts you can hold in your head. Somewhere along the way the busiest thing on the chain became spam, and last month it became a phishing campaign.

One line runs through all of this and belongs up front. XRP the coin is widely owned and heavily traded. Almost all of that trading happens inside exchange accounts, where it leaves no record on the ledger. We are counting the ledger here, and the coin is a separate question.

02 · A few hundred machines

The busiest thousand accounts have taken most of the chain every year since 2013

Last August the ledger settled about 82 million transactions. Just over a fifth of a million accounts sent them. Group those accounts by how hard each one worked and the chain comes apart.

Nearly half of every account that touched the ledger in August sent a single transaction. Four fifths of them sent five or fewer, and all of those people together produced about a third of one percent of the chain.

This is not a recent turn. We ran the same count for every year since the ledger opened. The share of traffic taken by the busiest thousand accounts has never once fallen below seven tenths, and in one year it reached almost the whole chain.

So we sorted the 793 by what they actually do. Every one of them falls into a machine category, and they account for the whole of that top band.

Bots and outright spam are 78.8% of the ledger. Not one exchange appears in the group, and the two accounts labelled no-op spam send a transaction type that changes a setting and moves nothing at all.

03 · The growth is dust

The median XRP payment in 2024 was the smallest amount the ledger can express

For most of the ledger's life its busiest transaction type was an order placed on the built-in exchange. In 2024 that changed. Payments overtook orders, counts roughly tripled, and the charts that track XRP Ledger activity turned sharply upward.

Then we looked at how much money those payments moved.

About two in every five XRP payments this year have delivered ten drops or less. A few thousand senders produced all of them, and they went out to millions of wallets. It is the same trick other chains see. Fill a stranger's wallet with an amount too small to matter, and your address is now in their history.

This matters for anything you read about XRP Ledger activity. A figure that counts wallets receiving a transaction absorbs all of that spam. Every number here counts the account that sent and signed, which spam cannot inflate.

04 · What the dust actually says

A phishing campaign that reached 1.28 million wallets in 17 days

XRPL payments can carry a memo, and the memo is readable text. So we read them. In August, 11.7 million payments carried one. The largest single category is not a business.

Nothing of this kind existed on the ledger before 23 August 2026. It started that day, ran to 8 September, which is the last day of our data, and was still going when we stopped counting. On its busiest day it sent more than 1.2 million messages. After the opening burst the fleet narrowed to about seven accounts, each pushing a few hundred thousand payments a day.

The whole thing cost 69.6 XRP in fees, roughly $160. That is what it costs to put a message in front of one in every seven accounts that has ever existed on this blockchain.

Two lines in that table deserve a note. The last one is a service that names its own purpose in the memo field of every payment it sends. The second is the one genuine surprise in this data: x402, the payment standard built for AI agents, is live on the XRP Ledger and stamps its payments Facilitator by t54 labs. It is the only growing use on this chain that is growing for a reason other than spam. We measured the same standard across six other chains and found a similar gap between transaction counts and money.

05 · Nothing is built on it

Payment channels: 58 accounts. Oracles: 16. Permissioned domains: 15.

A blockchain earns the word platform when other people build on it. The XRP Ledger has spent a decade adding the parts you would need: a built-in exchange, escrow, payment channels for streaming tiny payments, NFTs, an AMM, price oracles, digital identity, credentials, and a token type aimed at real world assets.

We counted the accounts that used each one over the twelve months to the end of August.

Payment channels are the feature that made the ledger famous with developers, the piece that was going to carry tiny streaming payments across the internet. In a year, 58 accounts opened one. Ripple's token type for banks and funds was used by 76 accounts. Permissioned domains, the compliance rail sold to regulated finance, were set by 15.

The built-in exchange deserves its own line. It carried hundreds of millions of orders in the year, which sounds like a market. Strip August down to what actually settled and both the exchange and the NFT market come out small.

06 · What the accounts hold

The median account has about $25 in it

Counting transactions tells you what accounts do. Counting balances tells you whether anyone has anything at stake. So we took the current XRP balance of every account ever created on the ledger.

The median XRP Ledger account holds 12 XRP, about $25. Nearly two fifths hold less than 10. At the other end, roughly a third of one percent of accounts hold more than four fifths of the XRP that sits on the chain.

That measurement has a useful check on it. The balances we counted come to 68.1 billion XRP. Ripple keeps around 32 billion locked in escrow contracts, which are separate ledger objects and are not account balances. The two add up to the 100 billion supply, which means the method reconciles against a figure derived a completely different way.

07 · Nobody stays

Two thirds of last year's arrivals never came back after their first month

New accounts do arrive. In its best month ever the ledger added more than a third of a million of them. What happens next is the question.

Nearly 7 million accounts have ever sent a transaction here. Fewer than a quarter of a million sent one in August, which is about one account in every forty that exists. More than half the accounts alive today first appeared this year, and 46% of all funded accounts have not been touched since the end of 2024.

That is the shape of a treadmill. The chain takes on hundreds of thousands of new accounts a year and keeps almost none of them, and the total holds steady because the arrivals replace the ones that quietly stopped.

08 · What the institutions actually do

A treasury schedule, a stablecoin held by ten addresses, and no banks

The case for the XRP Ledger has never really been retail. It is that banks and payment firms use it. So we went looking for them.

The largest flow on the chain by value is Ripple's own escrow. Every year since 2018, between nine and twelve billion XRP has been locked into escrows and released again, on a fixed monthly cadence. That is a treasury release schedule for the company's own holdings. It is the biggest thing here and it is Ripple paying Ripple.

The one thing genuinely working is RLUSD, Ripple's dollar stablecoin. It opened at the end of 2024, and the amount moving through it has grown by more than seventy times since. That growth is real and it is the best signal on the ledger. Its ownership is another matter.

Then the banks. XRPL accounts can publish a domain, which is the closest thing the ledger has to a register of the businesses on it. We searched every domain ever declared, across thirteen years, for anything reading as a bank, a payment company, a remittance firm or a fund.

What comes back is memecoin token files and a handful of small XRPL sites. No bank appears. No payment company appears. Not one, in thirteen years.

09 · Take the machines away

What is left has not grown since January 2018

Every number so far describes a chain crowded with machines. The obvious question is what sits underneath them. So we removed them.

The test is deliberately generous. Keep any account that sent fewer than 100 payments in the month, which excludes every machine in the top band and nobody else. Then require at least one of those payments to have delivered more than a token amount, which excludes dust. What remains is people and small services doing something real.

Two numbers carry the whole argument. Those accounts are 89.6% of everyone who transacted in August, and their payments are 0.80% of the ledger's traffic. Nine in ten active accounts produce less than one percent of the activity.

The count itself has barely moved. There are about as many of these accounts now as there were in January 2018, before the ledger had an AMM, NFTs, a stablecoin or a hundredfold rise in the price of its coin. The peak came in December 2024, when RLUSD launched into a rising market. Two thirds of that has gone.

10 · The chain that opened six years later

Tron has 82 times the senders and spreads them properly

A number is easier to judge beside another number. Tron launched in 2018, six years after the XRP Ledger, and chased the same use: cheap payments and dollar stablecoins. Both chains sit in the same database here, so we ran the same count on each.

That month more than 17 million addresses signed a transfer on Tron. The XRP Ledger had about an eightieth as many accounts send anything at all. Our separate work on Tron takes apart what that chain carries, which is a different problem and a busier one.

11 · What the whole thing costs

Thirteen years of fees come to about $7.6 million, and nobody gets it

Every XRP Ledger transaction destroys a fee. The XRP is burned and no validator receives it, which makes the running total two things at once: a clean measure of how much the chain has been used, and the reason nobody is paid to run it.

Across thirteen years and five billion transactions the ledger has charged about $7.6 million. Its best year was 2025, at roughly $2.4 million, and this year is running well below that. Ethereum burns more than the XRP Ledger's entire history in a normal day.

Set the total burned against the supply and thirteen years of a public blockchain have consumed about one part in seven thousand of its own coin.

12 · How we counted

The traps, and what we could not do

The ledger is public and every figure here can be rerun. Bitquery's XRP Ledger API serves the same data these queries ran against, and our money-flow product and address APIs cover the tracing side.

For the same method applied elsewhere, see our Stellar real world asset census, and the tokenised stock market audit, which turns on the same split between activity and value.

13 · The record

The accounts behind the numbers

The XRP Ledger has no route on Bitquery's explorer, so these are listed without links. Any XRPL explorer will find them.

The XRP Ledger works. It has never gone down, and it settles in seconds for a fraction of a cent. Thirteen years on, the thing it has not managed to attract is people.