One of XRPL’s most distinctive features is its fee destruction model. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum (pre-merge), where fees are paid to miners, every XRPL transaction fee is permanently removed from the circulating supply. This process is irreversible and automatic.
How It Works
When you submit a transaction, the fee amount is subtracted from your account and simply deleted from ledger state — it does not appear in any other account. The validators that process the transaction receive no direct compensation from fees. Their incentive is maintaining a healthy network and protecting their own XRP holdings.
Daily Burn Rate
According to Glassnode analysis, the XRP Ledger generated roughly 650 XRP in fees per day during late 2025 (down from a peak of 5,900 XRP/day in February 2025 during the DeFi surge). At the current base fee, each transaction burns a microscopic amount, but volume effects accumulate over time.
Deflationary Impact
XRP has a fixed maximum supply of 100 billion tokens. Every burned fee permanently reduces this. While the daily burn is small, over decades of high-volume usage the cumulative reduction could become significant. This is a structural difference from proof-of-work chains where fee revenues sustain miners.
Why Burn Instead of Pay?
Paying fees to validators would create perverse incentives — validators might prefer high-fee transactions, creating a pay-to-play dynamic. Burning fees keeps the system neutral and aligns validator interests with network health rather than revenue extraction.
Must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances.
No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself because it is painse
March 2026
Fee in USD
March 2026
