XRPL Faces Ghost Chain Claim as Schwartz Defends Cheap Transactions Online

• An audit links 793 accounts to 93.2% of XRPL’s August transaction activity. 
• Schwartz argues low fees enable both meaningful use and high volumes of low-value activity. 
• XRPL charges a base fee of 10 drops, enabling cheap but high-frequency transactions.

An XRPL ghost chain claim has opened a dispute over what transaction counts reveal about blockchain use. David Schwartz challenged the label after an X user questioned the quality of August activity.

The account cited an independent Bitquery audit covering 5.06 billion transactions since 2013. It said 793 accounts generated 93.2% of August traffic. The post also claimed less than 1% represented human payments.

XRPL Ghost Chain Claim Centers on 793 Accounts

Bitquery counted about 82 million XRPL transactions during August 2026. Each of the 793 busiest accounts submitted more than 10,000 transactions that month.

Its classification placed 767 accounts in automated categories and identified 26 exchange hot wallets. Those exchange wallets produced 1.1% of total activity.

DEX order bots accounted for 48.1% of transactions, while dust distributors produced another 23%. Mixed activity, mainly NFT offer bots, contributed 14.3%.

Bitquery defined “human-scale” activity through a screening rule. Accounts needed fewer than 100 monthly payments and at least one payment above its dust threshold.

That method classified 89.6% of active accounts as human-scale or small-service users. However, their payments represented 0.8% of all ledger transactions.

Schwartz Defends Cheap Transactions on XRPL

Schwartz responded directly to the XRPL ghost chain claim. “Yes, it’s very cheap,” he wrote, while acknowledging that useful and useless transactions can share the network.

He then questioned whether higher costs and fewer low-value transfers would improve the ledger. His response addressed cheap activity, not each category within Bitquery’s audit.

Official XRPL documentation lists 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, as the minimum standard transaction cost. The network destroys that XRP instead of paying it to a validator.

Fees can rise when server load or open-ledger demand increases. Servers may queue or reject transactions that fail the applicable threshold.

Replies Narrow the Debate to Usage Breakdown

Public replies under Schwartz’s post largely discussed who should interpret the figures. One commenter referenced Schwartz’s role as a co-creator of the ledger.

The original poster then said the purpose was “just highlighting the usage breakdown.” That reply narrowed the claim from protocol quality toward transaction composition.

Another commenter rejected the critic’s reasoning but supplied no additional statistics. None of the publicly visible replies presented another August dataset challenging Bitquery’s counts.

XRPL records accounts and transactions, but it does not verify whether a person or automated process controls each address. Labels therefore depend on transaction patterns and clustering methods.

Payment Types Complicate the Ghost Chain Label

XRPL’s payment transaction type covers more than person-to-person transfers. It supports token issuance, redemption, cross-currency payments, partial payments, and currency conversions.

A currency conversion can send value back to the initiating account. Account creation also requires a payment transaction, according to the protocol documentation.

Meanwhile, the network’s built-in exchange uses offer transactions for limit orders. Automated market activity can raise totals without showing retail payment demand.

Cheap execution also lowers the cost of spam. Bitquery found one August account submitted nearly 13 million orders, while only 882 ended in trades.

Its human-use estimate is a behavioral classification, rather than an identity count.

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