Top 6 XRP Ledger RPC providers for payments in 2026

XRP Ledger is a payments-focused layer-1 blockchain built by Ripple, in continuous production since 2012. In 2026 it’s becoming as well known for tokenized real-world assets as for payments, with on-ledger tokenized value reaching $4.06 billion in early August.

Provider choice on XRPL changed shape this same month. The XRP Ledger Foundation partnered with Ankr to run free public RPC nodes ahead of the proposed v3.3.0 upgrade, which adds confidential tokenization and atomic settlement features aimed squarely at institutional issuers, and Chainstack added managed XRP Ledger nodes to its own platform in the same window. The practical implication: an RPC method set built around accounts and a native order book, not an EVM state trie, now has to serve both a decade-old payments use case and a fast-growing institutional tokenization one.

This guide compares the providers actually running XRP Ledger infrastructure today, what each supports, and how to pick one for payments, tokenization, or regulated fintech workloads.

💡 Already using Chainstack? Jump straight to the XRP Ledger tooling docs or deploy your endpoint in minutes.

Why RPC provider choice matters for XRPL

XRP Ledger doesn’t run the JSON-RPC method set most RPC comparisons assume. There’s no eth_call, no EVM state trie, no mempool in the front-running sense — the API surface is native rippled methods (account_info, submit, account_tx, book_offers) built around accounts, ledger versions, and the built-in order book. Consensus closes a new ledger version roughly every 3 to 5 seconds through validator agreement rather than mining, and once a ledger is validated its transactions are final — there’s no reorg risk for a provider to protect against the way there is on a probabilistic-finality chain. That changes what “production-grade” means: a provider needs to expose the right method surface reliably over both JSON-RPC and WebSocket subscriptions, and it needs to retain enough ledger history for the workload — payments apps mostly need current state, but issuers and analytics teams need history depth most shared endpoints don’t advertise clearly.

Ripple itself operates free public servers (s1.ripple.com, s2.ripple.com, and the xrplcluster.com cluster) that plenty of prototypes still point at. XRPL’s own documentation is explicit that these are not for sustained or business use and can go down without notice — useful as a baseline to test against, not a foundation to build a product on.

The criteria that actually separate providers here:

• Cost predictability and pricing model — flat request-unit pricing (Chainstack) versus per-call or credit-metered billing elsewhere. On a chain without archive/trace-style premium calls, the gap is smaller than on EVM chains, but it still shows up once WebSocket subscriptions and high account-history queries enter the mix.
• Ledger history retention depth — how far back account_tx and historical ledger queries actually reach. Chainstack’s Global Nodes retain a rolling window of ledger history; Dedicated Nodes allow deeper retention configuration, and this is the closest XRPL equivalent to “archive access” on an EVM chain.
• WebSocket subscription support — subscribe to ledger closes and transaction streams is how payment and DEX-monitoring apps track state in near real time, and not every provider treats it as a first-class citizen on the free tier.
• Mainnet and testnet coverage — a real constraint; not every provider below supports XRPL testnet, which matters for teams that want to test against the same infrastructure they’ll deploy to.
• Native DEX and AMM method support — book_offers, path_find, and amm_info are core to trading and liquidity workloads on XRPL and aren’t always documented as clearly as account and transaction methods.
• Dedicated Nodes options — for teams that need isolated throughput or configurable history depth beyond what a shared endpoint provides.
• SLA and compliance — uptime guarantees, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 — this matters more here than on most chains, given how much of XRPL’s current growth is institutional and RWA-driven rather than retail-DeFi-driven.

One criterion that doesn’t transfer from EVM comparisons: MEV protection. XRPL has no public mempool in the Ethereum sense and its native DEX settles offers through the consensus process itself rather than a searcher-extractable transaction queue, so “MEV-protected RPC” isn’t a meaningful axis here the way it is for Ethereum or BNB Smart Chain — it’s omitted from the table below rather than forced in.

Comparison table

The table below summarizes public positioning as of August 2026.

Provider	Pricing model	Free tier	Dedicated nodes	Ledger history retention	Compliance
Chainstack	Flat request units, 1 RU/call	Permanent, 3M RU/month, no card	Yes, 8 regions	Rolling window on Global Nodes; configurable on Dedicated	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001
Uniblock	Metered compute units	Permanent, 40M CU	No (routes to underlying providers)	Depends on routed provider	Not documented for XRPL routing layer
Blockdaemon	Free API key + custom enterprise	Free key, self-serve	Enterprise/custom (dedicated tier “coming soon” for XRP)	Not published	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001
Ankr	Free public tier	Permanent, free	No	~2 weeks	Not documented for XRPL
GetBlock	Per-request, flat count	40,000 requests/day	Enterprise “Unlimited” plan	Not published	Not documented
Quicknode	Credit-metered	1-month trial, no card	Yes	Not published for XRPL specifically	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001

⚠️ Note: Alchemy does not currently support XRP Ledger — teams running a multi-chain Alchemy stack will need a separate provider for this network. Infura is in the same position; neither lists XRPL among its supported networks as of this writing.

How to choose an XRPL RPC provider

1. Pricing model — flat vs. metered, and what it means here

Chainstack bills every XRPL call as 1 request unit regardless of method, on the same flat RU model used across its supported chains. Quicknode and Uniblock meter usage in credits or compute units, where WebSocket subscriptions and high-volume account_tx history pulls consume faster than a simple account_info lookup. True cost per call = (method’s credit/CU weight × price per unit) ÷ total units purchased — multiply by expected monthly call volume to see the real bill, not the sticker price. For a payments app polling account balances and submitting transactions at moderate volume, the gap between models is modest; for an analytics pipeline pulling deep transaction history across many accounts, it compounds quickly. Run the interactive cost calculator against your own request mix before committing to a tier.

2. Ledger history retention

XRPL doesn’t have an EVM-style archive/trace/debug namespace — the equivalent constraint is how many past ledger versions a node retains for account_tx and historical ledger lookups. Chainstack’s XRPL Global Nodes keep a rolling multi-day window; Dedicated Nodes give teams control over retention depth for compliance, forensics, or backfill workloads that need to reconstruct account history further back. Ankr’s public nodes, by contrast, retain roughly two weeks of transaction history with full archive explicitly on its roadmap rather than live today — fine for current-state payment flows, not sufficient for a compliance team reconstructing six months of transfers.

3. Free tier reality

Chainstack’s Developer plan is a permanent free tier — 3,000,000 RU/month, 25 RPS, no credit card at signup. Ankr’s public XRPL tier is also free with no card required, though without a published SLA. Uniblock’s free tier (40M compute units/month) is likewise permanent. Quicknode is the outlier: its entry offering is an explicit one-month free trial rather than a standing free plan — worth knowing before building a hackathon prototype you expect to keep running past 30 days. GetBlock caps its free tier at 40,000 requests/day, which is workable for testing but tight for a live payments integration.

4. When dedicated infrastructure matters

Three concrete signals it’s time to move off a shared endpoint: sustained request volume above what a free or entry paid tier’s RPS ceiling supports; a compliance or audit requirement that a specific customer’s traffic not share infrastructure with other tenants; or a need for ledger history retention deeper than a shared node’s default window. Dedicated Nodes address all three on Chainstack’s XRPL offering, currently available in seven regions.

5. Native DEX and AMM method coverage

book_offers (order book depth), path_find (cross-currency payment routing), and amm_info (automated market maker pool state) are what separate an XRPL provider that just proxies basic account and transaction calls from one that supports the chain’s actual differentiator — its native, protocol-level exchange. Verify a provider documents these explicitly rather than assuming full-method coverage from a general “we support XRPL” claim.

6. Support quality — tiered, not “SLA yes/no”

Chainstack pairs its free Developer plan with community support (Discord and Telegram, with Chainstack engineers active in-channel) and moves to email SLA response on paid tiers, with 24/7 enterprise escalation at the top. Blockdaemon and Quicknode both position themselves toward institutional buyers with dedicated account contacts on enterprise tiers; Ankr and GetBlock’s public tiers are largely self-serve and docs-driven. Name the tier you’re actually on before assuming a provider will have an engineer look at a stuck WebSocket subscription.

7. Latency consistency, not headline latency

A payments flow that submits a transaction and polls for validation cares about p95/p99 latency under load, not a marketing page’s best-case number. XRPL isn’t on Chainstack’s public performance dashboard or compare.chainstack.com yet — it’s a newly added chain as of August 2026, and neither tool covers it.

⚡ Benchmark before you commit: Run a quick latency test against each provider’s endpoint from your target region before committing — a curl loop or k6 script hitting server_info and a heavier call like account_tx with a wide range is enough to surface meaningful p95/p99 differences.

Choose by use case

Cross-border payments and remittance

Payments are XRPL’s original and still primary workload — sub-cent fees and 3-5 second finality make it viable for remittance corridors where wire fees and multi-day settlement are the alternative. Ripple’s own RLUSD stablecoin, issued natively on XRPL alongside Ethereum, has grown to roughly $1.7 billion in market cap and adds a second payments rail on the same ledger — settlement and stablecoin transfer traffic increasingly share the same RPC surface. The technical demand here is different from a DeFi chain: apps mostly poll account_info for balance state, submit payment transactions, and subscribe to ledger closes for confirmation — a comparatively light, predictable call pattern rather than a bursty one, but reliability and WebSocket stability matter more than raw throughput.

For this workload, a permanent free tier with no card requirement (Chainstack, Ankr, Uniblock) is worth more than a slightly better headline throughput number, since most payment integrations spend more time on reliability testing than in production at scale. Providers with global points of presence — Chainstack’s Global Nodes, geo-balanced by design — reduce the latency variance that shows up as inconsistent confirmation times for end users in different regions.

RWA tokenization and institutional issuance

XRPL’s tokenization activity has grown fast enough to become a second identity for the chain: represented real-world-asset value on-ledger reached $4.06 billion in early August 2026, and the proposed v3.3.0 upgrade adds Confidential MPT — zero-knowledge-shielded balances for Multi-Purpose Tokens — plus atomic batch transactions for delivery-versus-payment settlement. Both are aimed directly at institutions that need privacy from public view while still supporting an auditor’s access.

This is a workload where ledger history retention and dedicated infrastructure stop being optional: an issuer reconstructing a token’s transfer history for a regulator needs deeper account_tx retention than a two-week public-node window, and needs it on infrastructure it isn’t sharing with anonymous public traffic. Chainstack’s Dedicated Nodes with configurable retention depth, and Blockdaemon’s institutional-grade node access, both fit better here than a free public endpoint — even though the free tier is the right starting point for prototyping against the same MPT and AMM methods before an issuance goes live.

Enterprise and regulated fintech infrastructure

Payments and tokenized-asset issuance both carry compliance weight that most crypto use cases don’t: a regulated remittance corridor or a tokenized fund needs a vendor attestation trail, not just an SLA. Chainstack publishes both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications; so do Blockdaemon and Quicknode among the providers compared here. Ankr and GetBlock don’t publish either certification for their XRPL offering as of this writing, which is worth knowing before a compliance review rather than after.

For this use case, look past the free-tier pitch entirely: what matters is contractual SLA language, enterprise support response commitments, and whether the vendor can produce an attestation a regulator or auditor will accept. Dedicated infrastructure and audited certifications both matter more than raw pricing at this stage.

Provider-by-provider breakdown

Chainstack

Chainstack added XRP Ledger support in August 2026, running Global Nodes, Dedicated Nodes, and Self-Hosted deployments across XRPL Mainnet and Testnet, with both JSON-RPC and WebSocket access to the full public XRPL method set — account_info, account_tx, submit, book_offers, path_find, amm_info, and server_info among them.

Pricing follows Chainstack’s flat request-unit model rather than method-weighted credits — every XRPL call costs the same 1 RU regardless of whether it’s a balance check or an order-book query, which keeps the bill predictable for payments apps with unpredictable call mixes. The Developer plan is a permanent free tier with no credit card required, and Dedicated Nodes are available across seven regions (Ashburn, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and Singapore) for teams that need isolated infrastructure or deeper ledger history retention than the default rolling window on Global Nodes. Chainstack Self-Hosted also added XRPL Mainnet and Testnet as deployment targets this month, for teams that need the node inside their own environment rather than a managed one. Chainstack holds both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification, relevant given how much of XRPL’s current growth is institutional.

Limitations: XRP Ledger is a new addition to Chainstack’s supported-chain list — there’s no dedicated methods-list or debug/trace documentation page yet, and the platform’s Grafana performance dashboard doesn’t cover XRPL, so teams evaluating latency need to benchmark it themselves rather than pull a pre-computed number.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Excellent — flat billing and geo-balanced Global Nodes suit a payments app’s steady, unpredictable call mix.
• RWA tokenization: Strong — configurable retention depth on Dedicated Nodes is a real fit for issuers who need to reconstruct transfer history.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Strong — both certifications are published, though the chain-specific track record is only weeks old.

Uniblock

Uniblock is a managed multi-chain infrastructure layer that routes requests across 55+ underlying RPC providers, and it lists Ripple (XRP Ledger) among its supported networks with a dedicated JSON-RPC endpoint (chainId=ripple) alongside Bitcoin and Tendermint method groups. Rather than running its own XRPL nodes, it pools capacity across upstream providers — Chainstack among them — with automatic routing and failover.

The free tier runs up to 40 million compute units a month with a permanent no-cost plan, scaling to a Growth tier at $49/month and higher tiers up to Business at $549/month for teams running many projects at once. For a team already using Uniblock’s higher-level Unified APIs (token, NFT, market data) across other chains, adding XRPL through the same account avoids standing up a separate integration just for one chain.

Limitations: Uniblock doesn’t run dedicated XRPL infrastructure of its own — reliability and ledger history depth depend on which upstream provider it’s routing to at a given moment, which is a real tradeoff against evaluating a specific chain-specialist provider directly.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Good — works fine for straightforward balance and submission calls, less transparent on which upstream node is actually serving a request.
• RWA tokenization: Moderate — the pooled-routing model doesn’t offer the same retention-depth guarantees a dedicated setup would.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Moderate — no published compliance certification specific to the XRPL routing layer.

Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon offers institutional-grade XRP node access through a native endpoint, alongside a broader lineup of custody, staking, and validator infrastructure that most of the other providers here don’t touch. Access starts with a free API key through self-serve signup, with a comprehensive method set covering account queries, ledger operations, transaction submission, and path-finding.

Blockdaemon holds both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications across its infrastructure, which matters for the institutional and regulated-fintech buyers XRPL’s current growth increasingly represents. Its non-custodial validator infrastructure runs at a stated 99.9% uptime.

Limitations: Blockdaemon’s dedicated XRP node tier is listed as “coming soon” rather than generally available — today’s access is through the shared free-key API, so teams needing isolated dedicated infrastructure right now should confirm current availability directly rather than assume it.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Good — solid method coverage, though not the first name that comes to mind for a lean payments integration.
• RWA tokenization: Strong — the institutional posture and dual certification are a genuine fit for issuers.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Excellent — built for exactly this buyer, custody and compliance included.

Ankr

Ankr became the XRP Ledger Foundation’s public RPC partner in early August 2026, deploying free public JSON-RPC nodes across multiple regions ahead of the proposed v3.3.0 mainnet upgrade. The free tier covers 43 methods across account queries, ledger data, transaction submission and simulation, path-finding, and payment-channel verification, with no signup friction for basic access.

Being the Foundation’s own recommended public infrastructure gives Ankr a credibility signal the other providers here don’t have out of the box, and it’s a legitimate no-cost option for prototyping or low-volume production payments flows.

Limitations: Ankr’s XRPL nodes retain roughly two weeks of transaction history, with full archive explicitly described as on the roadmap rather than available today — a real constraint for any workload needing to look back further, and there’s no published SOC 2 or ISO 27001 status for the XRPL offering specifically.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Strong — free, Foundation-backed, and sufficient for current-state balance and submission workloads.
• RWA tokenization: Limited — the two-week retention window rules it out for anything needing historical reconstruction.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Moderate — no published certification to point a compliance review at yet.

GetBlock

GetBlock runs managed XRP Ledger RPC nodes for both mainnet and testnet, counting every API call as one request regardless of method complexity — a flat-count model rather than a weighted one. The free tier allows up to 40,000 requests a day, enough for active development and testing without immediately requiring a paid plan.

Paid plans start at $29/month for teams past the free tier’s daily cap, with an “Unlimited” enterprise plan available for production volume without per-request metering.

Limitations: GetBlock doesn’t publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification for its infrastructure, and dedicated-node details for XRPL specifically aren’t documented publicly the way Chainstack’s or Blockdaemon’s are — worth a direct check for any compliance-sensitive use case.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Good — the flat per-request count is easy to reason about for a simple integration.
• RWA tokenization: Limited — no documented retention-depth or archive story for XRPL.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Limited — no published certification to satisfy a vendor security review.

Quicknode

Quicknode supports both XRP Ledger mainnet and testnet through its standard RPC and webhook infrastructure, backed by a stated 99.99% uptime SLA and both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. It’s a recognizable name for teams already running other chains through Quicknode who want to add XRPL under the same account.

Limitations: There’s no permanent free plan — Quicknode’s entry offering is an explicit one-month free trial rather than a standing tier, so a hackathon or long-running prototype needs to budget for a paid plan sooner than on Chainstack, Ankr, or Uniblock. Quicknode’s credit-metered pricing can also surprise teams once WebSocket subscriptions and high-volume history queries enter the mix — worth modeling against your own call pattern before committing to a tier.

Fit by workload:

• Payments: Good — reliable and well-documented, though the trial-only free tier is a real friction point for early-stage teams.
• RWA tokenization: Good — enterprise tiers make it workable for institutional issuers willing to pay for it.
• Enterprise/regulated fintech: Strong — dual certification and a 99.99% uptime SLA check the boxes a compliance review looks for.

Getting started with XRPL on Chainstack

Deploy a production XRP Ledger endpoint in a few steps:

1. Log in to the Chainstack console (or create an account).
2. Create a new project
3. Select XRP Ledger as your blockchain protocol
4. Choose network: XRP Ledger Mainnet or Testnet
5. Deploy the node
6. Open Access and credentials and copy your HTTPS and WebSocket endpoints

For workloads that need isolated throughput or deeper ledger history retention, Dedicated Nodes and Self-Hosted deployments are both available inside the same project.

from xrpl.clients import JsonRpcClient
from xrpl.models.requests import AccountInfo, ServerInfo

client = JsonRpcClient("YOUR_CHAINSTACK_ENDPOINT")

# Basic node health check
info = client.request(ServerInfo()).result["info"]

# Account balance and sequence lookup
account = client.request(AccountInfo(
    account="YOUR_XRPL_ADDRESS",
    ledger_index="validated",
)).result["account_data"]

print(f"Validated ledger: {info['validated_ledger']['seq']}")
print(f"Account balance (drops): {account['Balance']}")

📖 For the full integration guide, see the Chainstack XRP Ledger tooling documentation.

🤖 You can also access Chainstack XRP Ledger RPC directly from Claude, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, Claude.ai, or ChatGPT using Chainstack MCP. For a fuller agent stack — MCP, the Chainstack skill, llms.txt for context ingestion, and WebMCP for agentic browsers — see the Chainstack Agents page.

Conclusion

XRPL’s provider landscape in 2026 is thinner than an EVM chain’s but genuinely functional, and the decision mostly comes down to what the free public server can’t give you: retention depth, an SLA, or an audited certification.

• Cross-border payments: Chainstack or Ankr for the free, reliable baseline; Blockdaemon or Quicknode once compliance sign-off is required.
• RWA tokenization and issuance: Chainstack Dedicated Nodes or Blockdaemon, for retention depth and institutional posture.
• Enterprise and regulated fintech: Chainstack, Blockdaemon, or Quicknode — the three with published SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does XRP Ledger have smart contracts like Ethereum?

No. XRPL doesn’t run an EVM or general-purpose smart contract layer natively — it has a native decentralized exchange, AMM, and increasingly a Multi-Purpose Token standard for tokenized assets, but application logic lives off-chain or in XRPL-adjacent sidechains like XRPL EVM rather than in on-ledger contracts.

Q: Which XRPL RPC providers have a permanent free tier?

Chainstack (3,000,000 RU/month, no card required), Ankr (free public tier, no card), and Uniblock (40 million compute units/month) all offer standing free plans. Quicknode’s entry offering is a one-month free trial rather than a permanent tier — plan accordingly if you’re prototyping long-term.

Q: What does the XRPL v3.3.0 upgrade change, and do I need to switch RPC providers for it?

v3.3.0 is a proposed set of amendments — Confidential MPT, batch transactions, and permission delegation among them — still pending validator approval as of this writing. It doesn’t require a provider switch on its own, but once it activates, confirm your provider exposes any new methods it introduces rather than assuming existing method coverage carries over automatically.

Q: How does latency compare across XRPL RPC providers?

There’s no pre-computed benchmark yet — XRPL isn’t on Chainstack’s performance dashboard or compare.chainstack.com as of this writing, since chain support only went live in August 2026. Run your own server_info and account_tx latency tests from your target region before committing to a provider.

Q: Do XRPL RPC providers support compliance certifications like SOC 2?

Chainstack, Blockdaemon, and Quicknode all publish SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. Ankr and GetBlock don’t publish either certification specifically for their XRPL offering as of this writing — worth confirming directly if a vendor security review is part of your evaluation.

Q: How does XRPL RPC pricing compare to EVM chain pricing?

XRPL doesn’t have the debug/trace/archive premium-call categories that make EVM pricing hard to predict — most providers here bill per call or per credit rather than by method weight. Chainstack’s flat 1-RU-per-call model still simplifies forecasting for apps with an unpredictable mix of account, transaction, and order-book calls; Quicknode and Uniblock meter in credits or compute units that scale with subscription and history-query volume.

Additional resources

• Chainstack introduces XRP Ledger support
• XRP Ledger official documentation
• XRP Ledger consensus protocol
• Chainstack pricing