XRP Market History

What is XRP?

XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, a public blockchain designed for transferring value. It can move directly between ledger addresses without requiring a bank, card network, or central clearing service to update the ledger. XRP is divisible into one million units known as drops, allowing the network to represent both large transfers and very small fees. The asset is not a share in a company and does not grant ownership rights over the ledger. Instead, it functions within the protocol as transferable value and as the currency used to pay transaction costs. Its separate trading history can be explored through the XRP price history page.

The XRP Ledger can also issue and exchange representations of other assets, including currencies, tokens, and credentials. Within that broader system, XRP has a special role because it exists natively rather than as an obligation issued by an account. Every address must satisfy a reserve requirement denominated in XRP, while each submitted transaction destroys a small amount of XRP as a fee. These rules make large-scale spam more expensive and help control how much ledger data accounts create. XRP’s supply was created when the ledger began, so the protocol does not distribute new units through mining. Historical trading milestones, including the asset’s all-time high, describe activity on exchanges rather than changes to these underlying ledger functions.

How does XRP work?

The XRP Ledger reaches agreement through a consensus process rather than proof-of-work mining. Independent validator servers evaluate proposed transactions and compare them with the proposals they receive from validators they consider reliable. Through repeated rounds of voting, participating servers converge on a candidate set of valid transactions. Once sufficient agreement is reached, that set is applied to the ledger, producing a new validated ledger version. This process normally settles ledger updates within seconds and does not require miners to compete by performing energy-intensive calculations. Validators do not receive newly issued XRP for participating, and paying a transaction fee does not transfer that fee to a validator.

Transactions are authorized with cryptographic signatures and must follow rules covering sequence numbers, available balances, reserves, and asset-specific settings. The protocol supports direct XRP payments, issued-token transfers, escrow, payment channels, checks, an on-ledger exchange, and automated market maker functionality. Its pathfinding system can identify routes that convert between assets while a payment is being completed, subject to available liquidity and user-defined limits. XRP may serve as an intermediate asset in such a route, but the protocol does not require every payment to use it as a bridge. Separate derivatives indicators, such as XRP funding rate history and XRP liquidation history, reflect activity on trading venues and are not part of the XRP Ledger’s consensus mechanism.

Origins and history

The XRP Ledger began operating in 2012, when its initial ledger state created a fixed supply of 100 billion XRP. No additional XRP can be produced under the protocol’s established issuance rules. Because transaction fees are destroyed, the total supply can decline gradually as the network is used, although ordinary fees are intentionally small. Early development focused on a shared ledger that could confirm transfers without proof-of-work and could represent multiple types of value. The ledger’s design included features such as trust lines for issued assets, an order-book exchange, and a reserve system intended to discourage unlimited account and object creation.

Over time, the protocol has evolved through an amendment system. Amendments define changes to transaction types, ledger behavior, or consensus rules, and validators signal whether they support activating them. This structure has enabled features including escrow, payment channels, checks, non-fungible tokens, sidechain-related interoperability tools, and automated market makers to be introduced through defined protocol changes. The ledger has also experienced operational incidents and periods of degraded performance, prompting continued work on validation, server software, and network resilience. Despite those changes, XRP’s core characteristics remain tied to the same public ledger: a fixed initial issuance, signature-authorized transfers, transaction fees that are destroyed, and consensus-based validation without proof-of-work mining.

XRP's market record at a glance

XRP has traded for 4,002 days since 2015-02-20. Its all-time high of $3.66 came on 2025-07-18, its all-time low of $0.002200 on 2015-03-03, and its deepest peak-to-trough decline measured -95.1%. The record includes 5 major drawdown episodes, each documented in XRP's drawdown history, with the complete year-by-year record in XRP's price history.