XRP Ledger’s Low Fees Under Fire? Ripple CTO Emeritus Defends Burn Mechanism

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz defended XRP Ledger’s near-zero fees in a recent X conversation. An X user asked the Ripple CTO Emeritus for his perspective on XRP Ledger’s relatively low fees compared with other Layer 1 blockchains.

According to the X user, investors and analysts increasingly value L1s by fee revenue, and by that metric XRP Ledger looks tiny, because its base fee is a fraction of a cent.

The X user noted that XRP Ledger is different in a way the market overlooks: fees aren’t paid to validators; they are burned instead. “So on XRPL, fee revenue is really permanent supply reduction for every XRP holder,” he noted.

On the XRP Ledger, transaction fees are systematically burned, applying deflationary pressure to XRP’s permanently capped 100 billion total supply. Since the XRP Ledger’s inception, 14,403,762 XRP (0.014% of the supply) has been burned, according to XRPscan data. This low burn rate is due to the relatively low transaction fees.

The X user suggested the XRP Ledger could consider increasing its transaction fees to generate a greater volume of XRP burned: “validators could vote the base fee up modestly, say 10x or even 100x, and transactions would still cost well under a cent while burn volume rises meaningfully.”

The X user asked whether XRP Ledger’s near-zero fees matter more for payments and tokenization adoption, with Schwartz justifying the low fees on the network.  

XRP Ledger low fees explained

XRP Ledger network‘s fast and cheap transactions relative to other public blockchains make it particularly attractive for institutional use at scale.

“I get that cheap, fast settlement is the whole point. But if the market insists on judging chains by fees, is there a case for XRPL leaning into it? Or does near zero cost matter more for payments and tokenization adoption?” the X user asked.

In response, Schwartz, an original architect of the XRP Ledger, pushed back against using fee revenue to primarily evaluate Layer-1 blockchains, arguing that the metric can overlook the interests of network users.

“I think fee revenue is a terrible metric since it measures how much friction the chain ‘didn’t’ remove,” Schwartz said.

“If you represent the people who collect the fees, then fees are great. But what about the people who ‘pay’ the fees? Who cares about their interests?” Schwartz argued.