XRPL Fee Voting

How XRPL Fee Voting Determines Network Fees

Fee voting is the mechanism by which the XRP Ledger's decentralized validator network collectively adjusts the base transaction cost and reserve requirements. Each rippled validator operator can set preferred fee levels in their configuration. Approximately every 256 ledgers (called a 'flag ledger,' occurring roughly every 15 minutes), the network tallies each trusted validator's preference and adopts the median value. If a majority of validators agree on a change, a SetFee pseudo-transaction is inserted into the validated ledger and the new settings take effect from the following ledger version.

The purpose of fee voting is to balance two competing priorities: keeping the XRP Ledger accessible and affordable for legitimate users, while protecting the network from spam and denial-of-service attacks. The reference transaction cost (currently 10 drops or 0.00001 XRP) protects network CPU and bandwidth by making spam economically impractical. The reserve requirements (1 XRP account reserve, 0.2 XRP per object as of December 2024) protect server disk and RAM by discouraging excessive ledger object creation. Validators are incentivized to set reasonable fees because the health of the network benefits all participants.