Connectez XRP Ledger à Kryptos.

The XRP Ledger has been running since 2012. Your address is a string starting with the letter r, and one address covers your XRP along with every other token you hold.

Fees work differently here. XRP spent on transaction fees is destroyed rather than paid to anyone, so no validator receives it and there is no counterparty on the other side.

Two features catch people out on their tax reports: part of your balance is locked and cannot be spent, and exchange deposit addresses are shared between thousands of customers.

The part of your balance you cannot spend

Open any XRP wallet and you will see two numbers that do not match. The total is what you own. The spendable amount is lower, and the gap is the reserve.

The ledger requires every account to keep a small amount of XRP permanently in place, currently one XRP, plus a further amount for each item the account has open. Trust lines, unfilled orders, escrows and NFT holdings all count. Hold ten tokens and you have ten trust lines, each adding to the amount held back.

This is not a fee and it is not lost. The reserve stays yours, it can be spent on transaction fees, and closing an item releases the part it was holding. What you cannot do is send it to somebody else.

For tax, the reserve changes nothing. You own the full balance and you are taxed on the full balance when you eventually dispose of it. The reserve is a spending limit, not a deduction, and treating it as one would understate what you hold. Note that the amounts are network settings and can be changed by the validators, so check the current figures rather than relying on a number in an old article.

Why your exchange deposit address is not your wallet

On most networks, the address an exchange gives you is yours alone. On the XRP Ledger it usually is not.

Because creating an account costs a reserve, exchanges use one address for everybody and separate customers with a destination tag: a number you attach to the payment that says which account to credit. Thousands of people send to the same address every day, and the tag is the only thing distinguishing them.

Two consequences follow. If you send without the tag, the exchange has your money but no idea whose it is, and getting it credited means a support ticket. Some businesses reject untagged payments outright, which is the kinder outcome.

And if you import that address into a portfolio tool as if it were your wallet, you will pull in every stranger who used it that year. Add the exchange account instead. Kryptos then pairs your withdrawal from the wallet against the deposit at the exchange and books it as the transfer it was. For how transfers are treated, see the USA crypto tax guide or the UK crypto tax guide.

What the XRP Ledger does and does not do

The ledger has an exchange and a pool system built into the protocol itself, rather than as apps on top of it. Trading and providing liquidity happen at the network level.

What it does not have is staking. No new XRP is created, there are no validator rewards to earn, and holding XRP in your own wallet pays nothing. Every XRP that will ever exist was made at the start.

That matters because XRP staking is widely advertised. What those products do is take custody of your coins and pay a return from lending or trading them. That can be perfectly legitimate, but it is a company's product with a company's risk, and the income is treated as income from that arrangement rather than as a network reward. If your XRP left your wallet to earn a yield, record where it went.