About the XRP Ledger
The XRP Ledger is a public blockchain built for moving value. It settles in about three and a half seconds, costs a fraction of a cent, and is held by no single company — which is exactly why your keys belong to you and not to a service.
Own your words · Own your finance · Own your wallet
Settlement time
~3.5 s
A ledger closes and finalises in seconds, not hours.
Typical transaction cost
< $0.001
Fees are burned, not paid to miners.
Energy per transaction
No mining
Consensus replaces proof-of-work entirely.
Live since
2012
One of the longest-running public blockchains.
How the ledger works
Consensus, not mining
Independent servers called validators agree on the order and contents of each ledger. Nobody races to solve a puzzle, which is why there is no mining rig and no battery of energy behind a payment.
A universal ledger of accounts
Everything is an account with an address starting with r, a balance of XRP, and a sequence number. Balances are updated atomically inside a single ledger close.
Fees are destroyed
Every transaction burns a tiny amount of XRP. That makes spam expensive for the sender and means no one is paid for processing your payment.
Built-in features, not add-ons
Tokens, escrow, payment channels, multi-signing, and an order book live in the protocol itself, so you do not depend on a smart contract someone else wrote.
A short history
- 2012Open-sourced as a public ledgerThe ledger that became XRP Ledger was published as open-source software and has run as a public network ever since.
- 2013XRP becomes the native assetXRP was distributed from the ledger itself and 100 billion XRP were pre-created at genesis. No block rewards, no inflation schedule.
- 2018XLS and community governanceThe XRP Ledger Development Standards process opened protocol changes to independent proposal and voting by node operators.
- 2023AMM, hooks-era upgrades, EVM sidechainAutomated market maker functionality landed on mainnet, expanding what builders can do natively on the ledger.
- TodayA payments-focused public chainThe ledger is used for cross-border payments, token issuance, and self-custody wallets like the one you build here.
Why this matters for KeyVAULT
On the XRP Ledger, an account is controlled by the keys that sign for it. Whoever holds the seed phrase holds the account. When a corporation generates and stores your phrase for you, your access is only as safe as their servers and their policies.
KeyVAULT turns your own words into on-ledger keys directly in your browser with Wallet.fromMnemonic(). Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored for you, and nothing can be taken from a company that never had it.
Talk to us
Questions about the ledger, integrations, or support.