XRP Ledger Foundation Reports 1.7 Million Daily Ankr Node Requests

The XRP Ledger Foundation said on Nov. 12 that Ankr's free public nodes process more than 1.7 million developer requests every 24 hours. The figure describes infrastructure traffic, not completed payments, and the Foundation has not disclosed how many developers or applications stand behind it.

The announcement carries a specific limitation. It counts calls to public remote procedure call (RPC) endpoints, and a single application can generate thousands of such calls in a day. One heavy user, or one misconfigured script, could account for a large share of the total.

What exactly was measured?

An RPC request is a message that software sends to a node in order to read blockchain data or submit a transaction. Some requests merely retrieve account balances or ledger information. Others simulate transactions or broadcast them to the network.

The Foundation's number therefore conflates read-heavy polling with actual transaction submission. The update did not specify a measurement cutoff, an exact measurement window, or a methodology for counting. It did not break the totals down by request type, by application, or by developer.

The 1.7 million figure also spans both mainnet and testnet without separating them. Testnet traffic, which is free and often automated, could represent a meaningful portion of the total. In plain words: the headline number proves demand exists, but not from whom, or for what.

What is Ankr's role on the XRP Ledger?

Ankr launched its public RPC service for the XRP Ledger on Aug. 3, 2026. The service lets developers interact with mainnet and testnet without operating their own validator or full node, lowering the barrier to building on the ledger.

At launch, the service supported 43 methods. Those methods allow applications to retrieve account and ledger information, simulate transactions before submission, and submit signed transactions to the network.

Node operation carries real costs in hardware, synchronization time and maintenance. A free public endpoint shifts that burden from individual developers to Ankr's infrastructure, at least in theory.

What are the operational limits?

The service has constraints that the Foundation's announcement did not foreground. Ankr's full nodes retain approximately two weeks of ledger history, which corresponds to roughly 360,000 to 380,000 ledgers.

Requests for older data fail outright. Developers who need deeper historical queries must turn to an archive node or a block explorer service, neither of which Ankr's public offering provides.

The free endpoints are best-effort. They are subject to rate limits and carry no contractual uptime commitment, which matters for any production application that depends on them. An application built on a best-effort endpoint inherits that fragility, however impressive the daily request count may sound.

How does this differ from payment volume?

The Foundation's figure should not be read as a proxy for ledger usage. On-ledger payment volume measures XRP transfers between accounts, a fundamentally different metric from RPC traffic, as prior Nov. 11 coverage of XRP Ledger payment volume illustrated.

The two numbers can move in opposite directions. Payment volume can fall while RPC traffic rises, if developers poll account states more aggressively. RPC traffic can also be dominated by automated monitoring that never produces a payment.

Any comparison between the 1.7 million requests and ledger payment statistics would therefore be methodologically unsound. The Foundation did not make such a comparison directly, but the framing invites it.

What remains unknown?

The update leaves the central questions unanswered. It does not say how many distinct developers use the service, how many applications depend on it, or what share of requests come from testnet experimentation rather than mainnet activity.

Nor does it address whether request volume is growing, stable, or concentrated. A service handling 1.7 million daily requests could serve thousands of modest applications or a handful of heavy ones; the totals cannot distinguish between those scenarios.

The absence of a stated measurement window is a further weakness. Without a defined period, the figure cannot be independently verified or tracked over time. In plain words: the claim is plausible, but the Foundation has not published enough detail to test it.

What comes next?

The service has operated since Aug. 3, 2026, and the Foundation has now released one traffic snapshot without a methodology note. Whether it publishes recurring, disaggregated figures — separated by mainnet and testnet, and by request type — will determine whether this becomes a trackable infrastructure indicator or a one-time promotional statistic.