Minimum reserver for XRP (Ripple) ▫

I was looking at buying some XRP, then using the Trezor Suite to send the money to my Model T. I came across the following as I was messing around with the Trezor Suite interface:

“The current minimum reserve requirement is 20 XRP. Once you transfer the minimum reserve amount to a new address, you will not be able to move it elsewhere.”

What is this really saying? It appears to be saying that 20 XRP will always be held and can’t be sold/converted to USD, Euro, etc. Can someone explain a bit more what the above statement is trying to say?

Hi @packetpinger

Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM) are special crypto assets that have built-in requirements on minimum balances in order to activate the addresses - this is essentially similar to certain bank accounts that would require a minimum deposit to maintain for funds storage and management.

Once you have at least received 20 XRP/1 XLM in your wallet in one transaction, the token wallets will be activated and you may start sending funds - while maintaining the minimum balance of 20 XRP/1 XLM in your wallet.

This is also why your maximum send amount for XRP/XLM = your XRP/XLM balance - minimum balance required.

Ripple’s (XRP) official statement on minimum balance

The XRP Ledger applies reserve requirements, in XRP, to protect the shared global ledger from growing excessively large as the result of spam or malicious usage. The goal is to constrain the growth of the ledger to match improvements in technology so that a current commodity-level machine can always fit the current ledger in RAM and the full ledger history on disk.

To submit transactions, an address must hold a minimum amount of XRP in the shared global ledger. You cannot send this XRP to other addresses. To fund a new address, you must send enough XRP to meet the reserve requirement.

The current minimum reserve requirement is 20 XRP. (This is the cost of an address that owns no other objects in the ledger.) Each new account must set aside this much XRP, which cannot be recovered or sent to others.

You can learn more here.

Source: crypto.com

1 Like

Thanks very much for that explanation. It’s clear now that coins like XRP and XLM require you to permanently set aside 20 coins for eternity. Imagine if Bitcoin had done that? Someone could be sitting on half a million dollars they could never convert to cash. That would be a very hard pill to swallow. :slight_smile:

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