Destination tags, and the money they eat
Exchanges do not give each customer their own XRP address. They hold one address and distinguish customers by a numeric destination tag included in the payment.
Send XRP to an exchange without the tag and it arrives at the exchange's address with nothing indicating who it belongs to. It is not lost in a cryptographic sense — the exchange has it — but recovering it means a support ticket, proof, and in some cases a fee, and some exchanges simply will not do it for small amounts.
XRPSCAN shows the destination tag on every payment, clearly, as its own field. If you are checking whether a deposit will credit, that is the field to look at — the amount can be perfect and the payment still unrecoverable.
The same pattern exists on other chains under different names — memo on Stellar and Cosmos, comment on TON — and it causes the same losses. If an exchange gives you a deposit address and a number, the number is not optional.
Trust lines: the XRP Ledger’s unusual token model
Tokens on the XRP Ledger are not contracts. They are balances on trust lines — an explicit relationship between two accounts declaring that one will hold up to a stated amount of a currency issued by the other.
This has consequences no other chain shares. You cannot receive a token unless you have first opened a trust line to its issuer, which means unsolicited token spam is structurally impossible — a real advantage over BNB Chain or Ethereum, where anyone can push anything into your address.
It also means an issued token is a claim on its issuer rather than a bearer asset. If the issuer freezes the line or fails, the balance is affected. That is a different risk model from an ERC-20 and it is visible on the ledger rather than buried in contract code.
XRPSCAN lists trust lines on every account page with issuer and limit. For anyone holding issued currencies, that page is the actual position.
Reserves, and why some of your XRP will not move
The XRP Ledger requires every account to hold a base reserve of XRP to exist, plus an owner reserve for each object it holds — each trust line, offer, escrow or NFT page.
This is spam prevention and it works. It also means a portion of your balance is not spendable, and people regularly discover this at the worst moment, when a transfer of their "full balance" fails.
XRPSCAN separates the total balance from the reserved and available amounts. The reserve is not lost — delete an object and the owner reserve is released, and the base reserve returns if the account is deleted — but while those objects exist, that XRP does not move.
The reserve amounts are set by validator vote and have been reduced over time, so any specific figure quoted in older material may be stale. XRPSCAN shows current values, which is the right way to handle a parameter that changes.
The built-in DEX, escrows and payment channels
The XRP Ledger has had a decentralised exchange in the protocol since 2012 — offers are ledger objects, matched by the consensus process, with no smart contract involved. It also supports escrows that release on a time or a cryptographic condition, and payment channels for high-frequency low-value transfers.
These are protocol features rather than applications, which means an explorer can show them directly and completely. XRPSCAN does: open offers on an account, escrow objects with their release conditions, payment channel state.
Escrows in particular are worth understanding, since a significant amount of XRP has historically been held in them on published schedules. Anyone can verify those schedules directly rather than relying on an announcement, which is a genuinely useful property and one that ought to be used more often than it is.
API access
XRPSCAN offers a public JSON API with no key for reasonable volume, which we verified. Endpoints cover accounts, transactions, ledgers and the objects above.
The alternative is to query an XRP Ledger node directly — the rippled API is well documented and public servers exist. That gives you raw ledger data without XRPSCAN's presentation layer, which for some purposes is exactly right.
Our API comparison covers where XRPSCAN sits among the keyless options. It is one of a shrinking group, and worth noting for that alone.