About Reserves
Understanding reserves on the XRP Ledger
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Understanding reserves on the XRP Ledger
Last updated
Was this helpful?
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) has some great features!
Environmentally responsible - Very low carbon emissions
Super fast settlement - Transactions take about 4 seconds to settle.
Extremely low fees - Transaction fees cost about 0.000015 XRP or about 67,000 transactions for 1 XRP.
Incredibility versatile exchange network - Over 20,000+ issued currencies, native NFTs, Escrows, multi-signing, a built in DEX and more.
Decentralized - Run by a large group of community validators and node operators, it is one of the most democratic blockchains in the world.
In order to keep the network running safely, smoothly and efficiently, it was decided that a mechanism was needed to:
make it economically prohibitive to send spam
help protect the network from a distributed denial of service attack
help keep the footprint of the XRPL as slim as possible
The mechanism to achieve all of this is?
🎉🎉 XRPL Reserves 🎉🎉
If you interested in a quick explanation on how reserves work, check out this video...
...for a more indepth overview, keep reading.
The XRPL has two types of reserves:
This reserve is required to activate an XRPL account and needs to be maintained in order to submit transactions on the XRPL. The current base reserve is 1 XRP. Each XRPL account must contain at least 1 XRP, which is automatically marked as un-spendable by the XRPL in order to be able to transact on the XRPL. The base reserve cannot be used or sent to other accounts. It can only be recovered by deleting your account from the XRPL.
Fun fact! When the XRPL was first created the base reserve was 1000 XRP! It was reduced to 200 XRP, then to 20 XRP then to 10 XRP and has now settled to 1 XRP. (The XRPL validators monitor the state of the network and can vote to change the reserve amounts as the blockchain evolves.)
These reserves apply to objects on the XRPL that you own in your account. The owner reserve is currently set at 0.2 XRP per object.
Here is a list of objects that require an owner reserve:
An escrow
An open offer on the Decentralized EXchange (DEX)
A Trust Line for a token
SIgner list (Multi-sign)
Checks
Payment channels
NFT's (minted prior to the XLS-20 amendment)
NFTTokenpage ( 2 XRP per page)
Owner reserves can be recovered when the object is removed from the account. (i.e.. By finishing an escrow, deleting or fulfilling your offer on the decentralized exchange, removing your Trust Line, etc.)
Many of these operations can be performed in Xaman or by visiting XRPL Services at:
No. The base reserve and owner reserves are a function of the XRP Ledger. They have nothing to do with Xaman. Reserves are automatically applied to your account or to the object you own in your account.
Any reserve that is applied to your account, stays in your account. The XRP Ledger simply marks the reserve amount as 'un-spendable'. When the object is removed from your account, the reserve is marked as 'spendable' again. Xaman does not have access to your funds nor is Xaman involved in the XRPL reserves in any way.
On the main page of Xaman, press the Reserved button.
Xaman should display your Account balance, the amount of XRP Available for spending and a list of Reserved on ledger objects in your account.
In the above example, you can see that the account has 1 XRP marked as un-spendable to meet the wallet reserve and 0.2 XRP marked as un-spendable for each Token to meet the owner reserves for each of the Trust Lines created in the account.
When a NFT is minted on the XRPL, an object called NFTokenpage is created to 'store" it.
An NFTokenpage is an object on the XRPL so it requires a 0.2 XRP owner reserve.
If you would like to recover the 0.2 XRP for this object you need to get rid of all of the NFTs stored on this page. The site where you minted/purchased your NFTs will have instructions on how to do this.
NFTokenpage concept is a bit of a complicated topic but if you are interested in learning more about it, here's a link to an excellent resource:
As mentioned above, each XRPL account must contain at least 1 XRP to meet the base reserve requirement of the XRP Ledger. If you would like to recover the base reserve, the only way to do this is to delete your account from the XRPL.
There is a 0.2 XRP fee for doing this which is levied by the XRPL along with the normal transaction fee which applies to all transactions.
(These fees are part of the XRP Ledger and are in not related to Xaman.)
For more information about how to delete an account from the XRPL, please review this article:
