XRP Ledger Now Supports Deleting Accounts

At GateHub, we have always strived to stay on the cutting edge of payment and cryptocurrency technology. The XRP Ledger is one of our specialties.

We have a unique opportunity to present to you the latest major improvement on the XRP Ledger and to help the community and our customers understand this feature a bit better.

What’s the deal?

Until very recently - May 8, 2020, to be exact, an account on the XRP Ledger could not be deleted and the 20 XRP Base reserve was destined to remain locked on an activated address forever. Now, an account on the XRP Ledger can be deleted.

The XRP Ledger was designed to encourage public discourse about improvements to the public network. New features can be added after a consensus process takes place where 80% of the validators must agree to activate an amendment.

As David Shwartz put it recently:

“The purpose of this amendment process is to empower the community to coordinate activation of amendments that do have broad support with minimal disruption and to avoid an accidental fork if servers do not agree on network rules.” - Source

For the more tech savvy, here is a list of known amendments: XRP Known amendments

What does it actually mean?

For end-users it means that a portion of the Base reserve is now recoverable. 20 XRP are still needed to activate an account and all other reserve requirements still apply for regular use.

It also means that the XRP Ledger which holds a snapshot of all the active accounts can now become leaner when users decide to delete their unused accounts.

Simply put, a new transaction type allows users to delete the account and specify an address that should receive the remaining XRP. An account must not hold any trust lines or open orders and can be “recreated” later by funding it with another 20 XRP later.

For example, an account holding 35 XRP can now initiate a “DeleteAccount” transaction and send 30 XRP to another address. Formerly, only 15 of the 35 XRP could be recovered from such an account.

The 5 XRP that are spent on the transaction are used to keep the process of funding and deleting accounts for malicious purposes expensive.

Will GateHub support this feature?

GateHub will support this feature soon. We want to make sure that it is executed properly and that our other projects are not disrupted.

We will make sure to let our users and followers know the very moment this feature becomes available on GateHub. Make sure to follow our Twitter and Facebook accounts for up to date information.