XRP Drops – Understanding the Smallest Unit of XRP
A drop is the smallest denomination of XRP, equal to 0.000001 XRP (one millionth of one XRP). All internal XRP Ledger amounts — including transaction fees, reserves, and balances — are stored and processed as integer counts of drops, never as decimal XRP values. This eliminates floating-point rounding errors.
Drop Conversion Reference
| Drops | XRP | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.000001 XRP | Smallest possible unit |
| 10 | 0.00001 XRP | Minimum transaction fee |
| 1,000 | 0.001 XRP | – |
| 1,000,000 | 1 XRP | Current base reserve |
| 200,000 | 0.2 XRP | Owner reserve per object |
The base XRPL transaction fee is 10 drops — one ten-millionth of a single XRP coin. Even one million transactions consume only 10 XRP in total fees.
xrplnetworkfee.com
Working with Drops in Code
When using the XRPL APIs or client libraries, always specify amounts in drops as integers. The xrpl.js and xrpl-py libraries include utility functions (xrpToDrops() and dropsToXrp()) for converting between the two representations. Submitting a fee in decimal XRP rather than integer drops is a common developer error that will cause transaction rejection.
The Fee field in any transaction must be a string representation of an integer number of drops. For example, the minimum fee is always expressed as "Fee": "12" (10 base drops + 2 for safety margin recommended by many libraries) or simply "Fee": "10".
