XRP
Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back against using fee revenue as a primary measure of Layer-1 blockchain performance, defending the XRP Ledger’s near-zero transaction costs and arguing that low fees can reflect reduced friction for network users.
The discussion began after an X user questioned whether XRP Ledger’s minimal fees could leave the network undervalued when investors increasingly assess Layer-1 blockchains by the amount of fee revenue they generate. The user noted that XRP Ledger takes a different approach because transaction fees are burned rather than distributed to validators.
Under XRP Ledger’s fee mechanism, XRP used to pay transaction costs is permanently removed from circulation. According to the supplied XRPscan data, 14,403,762 XRP, or about 0.014% of the network’s 100 billion capped supply, had been burned since the ledger’s inception.
The relatively small amount burned reflects the network’s extremely low transaction costs. The discussion raised the possibility of increasing the base fee by 10 or even 100 times while keeping individual transactions below one cent, potentially generating a larger volume of XRP burns.
Schwartz rejected the idea that higher fee revenue should automatically be viewed as a positive for a blockchain. He argued that fee revenue can instead represent the amount of friction users are required to pay for using a network.
His position places user costs and network revenue on opposite sides of the debate. Higher fees could potentially increase the amount of XRP permanently removed from supply, while the XRP Ledger’s current model prioritizes inexpensive transactions and settlement.
The debate is particularly relevant to payments and tokenization, where transaction costs can influence whether a blockchain is practical at scale. XRP Ledger’s low-cost structure is presented as a feature for users, while its limited fee generation creates a different metric for investors assessing blockchain economics.
For XRP Ledger, the question is therefore not simply how much revenue the network generates, but whether maintaining minimal transaction costs provides a stronger foundation for payment and tokenization activity. Schwartz’s comments reinforce the view that blockchain value cannot necessarily be measured by fee revenue alone.
