XRPL Foundation's Free Ankr Nodes Pass 1.7 Million Daily Requests

The XRP Ledger Foundation reported on Nov. 12 that its free Ankr-powered nodes now handle more than 1.7 million developer requests every 24 hours, a usage milestone for public infrastructure launched on Aug. 3.

"They now handle over 1,700,000 developer requests every 24 hours," the foundation wrote in its announcement, which advertised access without an API key or registration. Put in perspective, that is roughly 20 requests per second sustained around the clock — meaningful throughput for a free, keyless endpoint.

What does the service actually offer?

The rollout, announced jointly by the foundation and Ankr on Aug. 3, includes nodes in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Singapore, with traffic routed automatically between locations. Separate mainnet and testnet endpoints — mainnet.xrpl-rpc.com and testnet.xrpl-rpc.com — let developers build against the live ledger or a testing environment without operating their own infrastructure.

Ankr's documentation lists 43 supported methods covering account information, ledger data, transactions, payment paths and server information. Practical capabilities include:

• Checking balances and trust lines
• Retrieving exchange offers and querying automated market maker instances
• Submitting transactions and previewing results through a simulation method before broadcast
• Returning data on payment channels, network fees and protocol amendments
• Account tools that retrieve NFTs, owned ledger objects and transferrable currencies

What are the limits for production use?

The free tier carries real constraints. The portal applies a community rate limit enforced per IP address, offers best-effort availability and lacks the uptime commitment of Ankr's paid offerings, which include higher throughput, dedicated keys and service-level commitments.

The deeper constraint is historical data. Ankr's technical documentation says its XRPL full nodes retain roughly the latest two weeks of ledger history — approximately 360,000 to 380,000 ledgers. Requests for older transactions or ledgers fail outright, and the documentation directs applications needing deeper records to a dedicated archive or explorer service.

XRPL's official server directory lists alternative public connections operated by Ripple, InFTF and Honeycluster, including services with full ledger history. The directory cautions that Ripple's public servers are not intended for sustained or business use and recommends running a server or contracting a trusted operator for regular production workloads.

The timing problem: Ankr's Ethereum bridge exploit

The usage update landed three days after Blockaid identified an exploit of an Ankr Ethereum bridge on Nov. 9 involving five unauthorized withdrawals totaling more than $303,000 in priced assets. According to the security firm's transaction analysis, an attacker reused a small Optimism deposit that had already been redeemed, submitting modified withdrawal information covering different assets and amounts.

Blockaid's initial report did not establish that Ankr's RPC infrastructure or personal wallets were compromised, and Ankr had not responded to questions about affected services or possible reimbursements by publication time. For XRPL developers, the exploit sits adjacent to but distinct from the node service they consume — though it sharpens due-diligence questions about dependency risk on a single infrastructure provider.

What comes next

Development on XRPL itself continues in parallel: a Nov. 11 update on lending development described ongoing testing of lending and single-asset vault tools, with both amendments still awaiting sufficient validator backing for mainnet activation. Practitioners building on the free tier should watch whether Ankr clarifies the bridge incident and whether the foundation extends historical data access as usage grows.