Fees on XRPL barely register
Chain fees on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) totaled less than $400 on Wednesday, according to DefiLlama, which tracks fees across major blockchains.
Bithomp, another XRPL explorer, put the burn at 327 XRP over the past 24 hours. That lines up with the same “worth less than $400” conclusion.
Stretch the lens to a week and the picture improves only slightly. Protos reports XRPL generated $3,100 in chain fees over the past week and roughly $16,000 over the past month.
The contrast gets sharper when you compare other networks, all from the same day. Protos cites Bitcoin at $183,000 in daily transaction fees to miners, Ethereum at more than $323,000, Solana at $358,000, and Tron clearing more than $1 million.
Burns, not paychecks
XRPL chain fees are burned, not paid to validators. Protos flags the distinction as minor in mechanism but big in economic incentives. The value of XRP burned for transactions on XRPL is still roughly comparable to “fees” paid elsewhere.
But the base cost is tiny. Protos points to XRPL documentation that sets the fee floor at 0.00001 XRP, or 10 drops.
At an XRP price near $1.11, Protos calculates that equals about one thousandth of a cent per transaction. That makes fees microscopic even during periods of high activity.
Protos also stresses that XRPL can process more than a million transactions a day, including computational and non-payment data requests. Even if all those transactions pay the minimum, that’s only 10 XRP burned. At current XRP prices, Protos says a million such transactions would cost less than $20 in fee value.
Why a busy chain can still earn almost nothing
Protos frames the situation as simple and brutal. XRP Ledger fees are designed primarily as an anti-spam floor. Because the fee is fixed and low, the daily burned value doesn’t swing much with demand the way market-fluctuating, demand-based fee markets do on networks like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s dynamics show up in Protos’s comparison. On April 19, 2024, Protos reports Bitcoin fees exceeded $80 million paid to miners. XRPL, by contrast, keeps its fee value near the floor.
And because XRPL fees are burned, Protos argues there’s no special reason for anyone to buy XRP specifically for “earning” chain fees. Burns do reduce supply and reward token holders equally, but Protos says the dollar amount involved is de minimis compared with XRP’s $69 billion market capitalization, which it describes as “almost all” speculative investment.
Fees are drifting lower
The “tiny number” also doesn’t look stable. Protos cites analytics firm Glassnode, saying daily fees fell about 89% over the course of 2025. Protos adds that last December hit “the lowest level seen since December 2020.”
Protos previously documented a related trend from another angle, with active XRP Ledger addresses down 80% during the first half of 2025.
The combined story is that activity appears to be weakening in ways that matter for fee generation, even if XRPL still processes huge transaction counts.
Key figures from Protos
| Metric | Time window | Value | Source in text |
|---|---|---|---|
| XRPL chain fees | Yesterday (Wednesday) | < $400 | DefiLlama, via Protos |
| XRP burned | Past 24 hours | 327 XRP | Bithomp, via Protos |
| XRPL chain fees | Past week | $3,100 | Protos |
| XRPL chain fees | Past month | ~ $16,000 | Protos |
| Base fee floor | Per transaction | 0.00001 XRP (10 drops) | XRPL documentation, via Protos |
| Minimum-cost estimate | 1,000,000 tx | 10 XRP burned | Protos |
| Glassnode daily-fee decline | 2025 | ~89% | Glassnode via Protos |
| “Lowest since Dec 2020” | Last December | lowest level | Glassnode via Protos |
So what it means
If you want XRPL fees as an indicator of economic traction, Protos’s numbers are hard to spin. Even with over a million transactions a day, the fixed anti-spam burn doesn’t translate into meaningful fee revenue in dollar terms.
And with Glassnode’s reported 89% daily fee drop through 2025, the decline doesn’t look like a one-day pricing quirk. For XRPL, fees stay structurally small, and the “shrinking burn” suggests fewer activities that clear the floor at any meaningful scale.