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

The XRP Ledger Foundation says the free public XRPL nodes it operates with infrastructure provider Ankr now process more than 1.7 million developer requests every 24 hours. The foundation disclosed the usage figure in an update on Nov. 12, covering infrastructure that went live in early August.

The number matters as a measure of real adoption. A request count of 1.7 million per day translates to roughly 70,800 requests per hour, or nearly 20 per second sustained around the clock. That is sustained traffic from wallets, explorers and applications — not a one-off spike — and it indicates that a meaningful share of XRPL development activity now runs through infrastructure the foundation and Ankr supply at no cost.

What does the service actually change for builders?

It removes the baseline cost and operational burden of connecting to the XRP Ledger. The portal provides free JSON-RPC endpoints for both the XRPL mainnet and the testnet. No API key is required. No sign-up is required. Any wallet or application can point at the endpoints and read or interact with the ledger without provisioning a server, maintaining an XRPL node, or paying a commercial RPC provider.

For small teams and independent developers, that changes the economics of shipping an XRPL product. Running a full server means hardware, synchronization time and ongoing maintenance; commercial remote procedure call services charge by volume. A free, keyless endpoint collapses both line items. For established teams, it offers a fallback path if their primary infrastructure degrades.

The foundation framed the August rollout as a widening of public access to the network for developers and users, and the usage data published this week is its first quantitative evidence that the offering found demand.

Visibility into network health

The portal is not only a connection point. It displays real-time metrics including:

• network health status
• ledger height
• median latency
• request volume

Those dashboards give developers operational telemetry they would otherwise have to assemble themselves, and they provide a public, neutral reference for anyone diagnosing whether a problem sits in their own stack or on the network side.

The mainnet and testnet coverage also matters for workflow. Teams can build and QA against the testnet through the same free channel they use in production, removing a class of configuration drift between environments.

Why usage numbers, not price, are the metric here

Infrastructure throughput is a leading indicator for ecosystem activity. Requests per day measure how many applications are actively reading or writing to the ledger — a signal of builder engagement that precedes any downstream effect on network utility. A foundation reporting its own usage figures is also a shift toward operational transparency: the number is verifiable in direction and magnitude against the portal's public request-volume display.

What does this change for the average practitioner? Anyone building on the XRP Ledger can now treat mainnet and testnet connectivity as a solved, zero-cost problem, and shift attention entirely to application logic.

The open question is capacity and reliability at scale: whether the foundation and Ankr sustain sub-100-millisecond latency as request volume grows, and whether free access remains unlimited as usage compounds.