What Is a Drop of XRP?

A drop is the smallest unit of XRP, equivalent to 0.000001 XRP (one millionth of one XRP). All transaction fees on the XRP Ledger are quoted internally in drops to avoid floating-point precision issues in the protocol.

Drops to XRP Conversion

The conversion is straightforward: 1,000,000 drops = 1 XRP. The standard transaction fee of 10 drops therefore equals 0.00001 XRP. When you sign a transaction, you must specify the Fee field in drops as an integer – for example, "Fee": "10" for a standard payment.

The rippled API always returns fee values in drops to maintain precision. Developer tools and wallet software typically convert automatically, showing fees in XRP or USD for readability.

Why Drops Matter for Developers

When building applications on the XRP Ledger, always handle amounts in drops (integers) to avoid rounding errors. The server_info command returns validated_ledger.base_fee_xrp in XRP decimal form; multiply by 1,000,000 to get drops. The server_state command returns the raw drop value directly as validated_ledger.base_fee.

Open-ledger cost escalation scales the base fee by the current load_factor. Monitoring this value before submitting high-priority transactions ensures they are included in the next ledger rather than queued.