- Ripple’s XRP Ledger can handle 3,400 transactions per second and 293 million per day, making it a perfect underlying ledger to power enterprise-level applications serving millions of users.
- However, the 3,400 figure is theoretical and was issued by Ripple to show what XRPL is capable of in a controlled environment—in the wild, the number is much smaller.
Only a blockchain that can handle thousands of transactions a second consistently can cross over into the mainstream and threaten platforms like Visa and Mastercard, and Ripple is one of the top contenders. However, the community remains divided on whether the network can hit the stated goal of 293 million daily transactions.
The debate kicked off with a tweet from Alex Cobb, an XRP influencer, and it has been ongoing ever since. Cobb pointed out that XRPL can handle 3,400 transactions per second. This translates to 204,000 per minute and 293 million daily.
“XRP is truly designed to be a global utility asset for banks all around the world,” Cobb added.
These are significant numbers. For context, Visa has a maximum transaction cap of 24,000 transactions per second. However, it processes way less on average, at around 1,700 transactions. Mastercard does even less. If XRPL could consistently facilitate 3,400 transactions per second, it could be in contention with Visa for the crown of the world’s fastest payment rail.
However, the number is theoretical. It was issued by Ripple, alongside other numbers such as:
- XRP transaction fees cost $0.0002 per transaction on average.
- Transactions settle on the XRP Ledger in 3-5 seconds.
- The XRP Ledger is 61,000 times more energy-efficient than proof of work blockchains.
In the real world, where conditions are less than ideal, the XRP Ledger processes fewer transactions. According to one expert, the number in the real world is usually less than a fifth of the stated number, averaging below 700.
Depending on who you ask, 500 to 700 based on the experience and data we have so far.
— Daniel “No” Keller (@daniel_wwf) October 3, 2023
Even with XRPL’s improving performance, it still faces some challenges. For instance, last month, the largest DEX in the ecosystem, Magnetic, revealed that since December 28, hundreds of accounts have been sending 0.000001 XRP in about 5,000 transactions daily in what seemed like a DDoS attack. This high number of transactions reportedly slowed down the network, and fees shot up hundreds of times. The slowdown affected Magnetic and other applications building on XRPL.
Magnetic added, “Another interesting thought: Currently, there are 60-70 transactions per second on the network (usually 20-25 transactions per second), and even with such activity, network users are experiencing problems.”
XRPL developers claim that the network can support 1500 transactions per second. If issues like these arise at 60-70 tx/s, what will happen at 1500 tx/s? While very powerful validator and blockchain explorer nodes will likely withstand such a load, what will happen to public nodes or nodes with limited capacities (due to the owners’ inability to afford them)?
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