Activating an account

Your wallet app makes a pair of keys. The public half becomes your address, a string that starts with "r". You can share the address with anyone.

An address is not an account yet. The ledger has no record of it.

The account appears when someone sends XRP to the address. The payment has to cover the base reserve, which is 1 XRP on mainnet. That first payment is called funding, or activation.

The base reserve stays locked. You can see it in your balance, but you cannot send it. It exists so the ledger cannot fill up with empty accounts at no cost. Every account takes space on every server that keeps a copy of the ledger.

Common ways to activate an account:

• Withdraw XRP from an exchange to the new address.
• Ask a friend to send at least 1 XRP.
• Buy XRP inside a wallet app that offers it.

Send more than 1 XRP if you plan to use the account. Each trust line, offer or NFT page locks a little more.

The reserve is not a fee. Nobody receives it. If you later delete the account, most of it comes back to you.

An XRPL address is derived from a key pair. Generating keys happens offline and touches nothing on the ledger. The AccountRoot entry is created only when a Payment delivers at least the base reserve in XRP to an address with no entry. No other transaction type creates an account.

Reserve values are set by validators through fee voting, not by a code release. Mainnet values on 2026-11-10:

Validators lowered both values on 2024-12-02. Before that they were 10 XRP and 2 XRP. Some older guides still quote 10 XRP.

Read the live values with server_info (validated_ledger.reserve_base_xrp and reserve_inc_xrp) or server_state, which reports drops. Other networks, such as Testnet and Devnet, can use different values.

A new account's Sequence starts at the index of the ledger that created it. This number matters again if the account is ever deleted.

See Owner reserve for the per-object cost and Getting reserves back for AccountDelete.