XRP

XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, a Layer 1 blockchain built primarily to facilitate fast, low-cost cross-border payments. It is designed to serve as a neutral bridge currency between different fiat currencies, allowing banks and financial institutions to settle international transfers without maintaining pre-funded accounts in each currency they transact in. The problem it claims to address is the slow speed and high liquidity cost of traditional correspondent banking.

The XRP Ledger reaches consensus not through mining or staking but through a federated protocol in which a set of trusted validators, each network participant selects via a Unique Node List, must reach eighty percent agreement before a transaction is permanently recorded. This design produces deterministic finality in three to five seconds and supports a throughput of 1,500 transactions per second. XRP itself is consumed in tiny amounts as a transaction fee to prevent spam, and the ledger also contains a built-in decentralized exchange capable of trading any tokenized asset.

The XRP Ledger charges users a small fee per transaction, which is destroyed rather than paid to validators or any central party, making it deflationary in design rather than a revenue stream. Over the trailing 24 hours the protocol collected 0.08 USD in fees, 0.63 USD over the trailing 7 days, 1.98 USD over the trailing 30 days, and 9,106.26 USD over the trailing 12 months; annualizing from the trailing 30 days produces 24.09 USD. Because fees are burned and not distributed, fee yield as a percentage of market capitalization is effectively zero, which means fee-based valuation measures on this site will reflect that reality rather than an active revenue stream.