XRP Retirement Calculator

XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, an open-source blockchain launched in 2012 by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto. Ripple Labs, the San Francisco company most associated with XRP, has built an entire payments business on top of the ledger, but the two are technically separate. The XRPL was designed for one thing above all else: moving value across borders faster and cheaper than the legacy banking system.

The XRP Ledger uses a federated consensus protocol instead of mining or traditional staking. Validator nodes propose transaction sets every 3 to 5 seconds, and once 80% of validators on a node's Unique Node List agree, the transaction is confirmed with deterministic finality. That means no probabilistic waiting, no rollback risk. The network handles roughly 1,500 TPS in production, with tests exceeding 65,000 TPS. Fees sit around 0.00001 XRP per transaction (about $0.0002), and those fees are burned rather than paid to validators. The XRPL also has a native decentralized exchange built directly into the protocol, which lets users swap any issued token on-ledger without smart contracts.