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 of the transaction, and in some cases a fee. Some exchanges will not do it at all for small amounts.
XRPSCAN shows the destination tag on every payment 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 elsewhere under different names — memo on Stellar and Cosmos, comment on TON — and causes the same losses. If an exchange gives you a deposit address and a number, the number is not optional.
Trust lines, and why there is no token spam here
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 account-model 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. That is a genuine advantage over BNB Chain or Ethereum, where anyone can push anything into your address and frequently does.
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 — which is arguably more honest, since the dependency exists either way.
XRPSCAN lists trust lines on every account page with issuer and limit. For anyone holding issued currencies, that page is the actual position.
Reserves: why some of your XRP will not move
The XRP Ledger requires every account to hold a base reserve of XRP to exist at all, 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.
The reserve is not lost. Delete an object and the owner reserve is released; the base reserve returns if the account is deleted. But while those objects exist, that XRP does not move.
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 rather than a hardcoded number, which is the right way to handle a parameter that changes.
Escrows, payment channels and the built-in exchange
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 are worth understanding in particular, since a significant amount of XRP has historically been held in them on published schedules. Anyone can verify those schedules directly on the ledger rather than relying on an announcement, which is a genuinely useful property and one that ought to be used more often than it is.
This is the recurring argument of this whole site in miniature. The point of a public ledger is that claims are checkable. An explorer is the tool that makes checking practical, and on the XRP Ledger a surprising amount of what people argue about is directly verifiable.
Consensus without mining or staking
The XRP Ledger does not use proof of work and does not use proof of stake. It reaches agreement through a consensus protocol in which each validator maintains a list of other validators it will not collude with, and ledgers close every three to five seconds when enough of those lists overlap.
This has a few consequences visible on an explorer. There is no mining reward, so no new XRP is created — the supply was issued at the start and only decreases, since transaction fees are burned rather than paid to anyone. Explorers therefore show a slowly declining total supply, which surprises people used to issuance schedules.
There are also no forks in the ordinary sense. A ledger either closes with agreement or it does not close. The reorganisation risk that shapes confirmation advice on proof-of-work chains does not apply in the same form, which is why XRP Ledger deposits typically credit after a single validated ledger rather than after a confirmation count.
The trade-off is the unique node list. Validators choose whom to trust, and in practice those lists are heavily influenced by published recommendations. Whether that constitutes meaningful decentralisation is a genuine and contested question, and an explorer will not settle it — though it will show you the validator set, which is more than most chains make easy.
What an explorer can settle is the specific claim. Escrow schedules, supply figures, validator participation — all of it is on the ledger and all of it is checkable, which is the recurring argument of this whole site.