Drops and supply

A dollar splits into 100 cents. One XRP splits into 1,000,000 drops. A drop is the smallest amount of XRP there is.

Apps show amounts in XRP because it is easier to read. The ledger itself counts drops. A fee of 10 drops is 0.00001 XRP.

When the ledger started, 100 billion XRP existed. That number was set once. No new XRP can be created.

The total goes down instead. Every transaction pays a small fee in XRP, and the ledger destroys that fee. No one receives it. Over many years those tiny fees add up.

On 2026-11-10 the ledger reported about 99,985,557,378 XRP in existence. That means about 14.44 million XRP has been destroyed by fees since the start.

Who held the XRP at the start? The ledger's creators gave 80 billion XRP to the company now called Ripple. In 2017 Ripple placed 55 billion XRP in escrow, so the amount entering general circulation would grow predictably. Escrowed XRP still exists and still counts in the supply.

Drops. XRP amounts in transactions and ledger data are strings of whole drops. 13.1 XRP is written "13100000". XRP has the precision of a 64-bit unsigned integer, where each unit is 0.000001 XRP. The format's maximum is 10^11 XRP, the 100 billion created at genesis.

total_coins. Every ledger header has a total_coins field. It is the total number of drops owned by accounts in that ledger. It omits XRP destroyed by transaction fees. So:

destroyed = 100,000,000,000 XRP − total_coins

Read it live with the ledger method:

{"method": "ledger", "params": [{"ledger_index": "validated"}]}

On validated ledger 108,248,978 (2026-11-10, 23:45 UTC) total_coins was 99985557378317349 drops. It falls a little with every fee-paying transaction.

What total_coins does not tell you. It still counts XRP held in escrow. It also counts XRP in blackholed accounts, whose keys no one knows. That XRP can never move, but it was not destroyed.

Where fees go. The transaction cost is not paid to any party. The ledger destroys it, even when a transaction fails with a tec code. See Fees and burn.