How much XRP Ledger activity is bots, spam or wash trading?

The full answer

Transaction counts, active accounts and DEX volume on the XRP Ledger are all published gross. None of the providers used on this trail says it removes bots, spam or trades between related accounts. A September 8, 2026 analysis by the blockchain data firm Bitquery, as reported by Analytics Insight, attributed 93.2% of August transaction traffic to 793 accounts and described substantial automated order activity. It did not estimate a wash-trading share of DEX volume. The share of DEX spot volume that is wash trading is not established: none of the cited sources gives an estimate as of September 29, 2026. DeFiLlama publishes wash-trading-adjusted “normalized volume” only for perpetual futures exchanges, not for DEXes.

What did the Bitquery study find?

Bitquery’s September 8, 2026 study counted about 82 million XRP Ledger transactions in August 2026. It found that 793 accounts, 0.37% of those active, each sent more than 10,000 transactions, and together sent 93.2% of the month’s traffic.[1] CryptoSlate’s count from the same data is 75.98 million of 81.56 million.[2] Bitquery grouped those 793 accounts by behaviour:[1]

Bitquery says “machines account for 767 of the 793”; the other 26 are exchange wallets paying out to customers.[1]

How did Bitquery decide what counts as ordinary use?

It kept accounts that sent fewer than 100 payments in the month, then required at least one payment “to have delivered more than a token amount.” By that filter, ordinary-looking accounts were “89.6% of everyone active in August and produce 0.80% of the ledger’s traffic.”[1]

Bitquery states the limits of its method: its groupings “are behavioural inferences rather than confirmed ownership, and may be incomplete or incorrect.” It also notes that “almost all” XRP trading “happens inside exchange accounts, where it leaves no record on the ledger.”[1] Its study measures the ledger, not XRP’s wider market.

How much of the transaction count is failed or test traffic?

A quarter of it, in Q2 2026. Blockworks’ quarterly report, as summarised by KuCoin, said failed transactions were 54.6 million, “24.5% of total transactions, compared with 19.0% in Q1.”[3] A failed transaction still counts in the total, and news.bitcoin.com notes that failed transactions still burn their fees.[4]

Single events show the pattern. On September 13, 2026, one ledger held a record 3,254 transactions. According to news.bitcoin.com, 20 accounts sent exactly 100 payments each of 1 drop, one millionth of an XRP, moving 0.002 XRP in all; at least 890 transactions in that ledger failed. Hussein Zangana, the XRP Ledger Foundation’s community director, who posts on X as Vet, said it “looks like throughput testing probably.”[4] Headline counts such as those on how much activity is on the XRP Ledger include this traffic.

Do bots inflate DEX trading volume as well as transaction counts?

Mostly they inflate counts. Bitquery found that its busiest order bot placed nearly 13 million orders in August 2026: “Out of nearly 13 million transactions, 882 ended in a trade.”[1] Across the whole ledger, it counted 2,970,922 settled trades on the built-in exchange that month, from 12,153 accounts.[1] Orders that are placed and cancelled add transactions but add no volume (our reasoning).

Bots also trade. In April 2026, Vet said in an X post reported by U.Today that “nearly all activity on the DEX came from this pair and associated bots,” meaning XRP/RLUSD. He said the bots “create offers and use the same OfferSequence to cancel the previous ones and adjust for pricing,” and that some bots post a “Ghost Wall” of offers with no liquidity behind them.[5] No published measure of the volume these bots generate, or of how often the walls mislead traders, was found in searches run on September 29, 2026.

Can accounts wash-trade on the ledger?

The ledger blocks one form. XRPL.org says: “If you place an Offer that crosses any of your own Offers that exist in the ledger, the old, crossed Offers are automatically canceled regardless of the amounts involved.”[6] The rule covers an account’s own offers. Nothing in it stops two accounts with the same owner trading with each other (our reading of the rule).

No published estimate of wash trading on the XRP Ledger DEX was found in searches run on September 29, 2026. The volume figures on XRPL DEX trading volume and the ratios on XRPL DEX liquidity turnover are therefore gross. DefiLlama describes its measure as “volume of all spot token swaps on the DEX,” with no filter mentioned.[10] Evernorth counts an account as “one ledger address that submitted a transaction.”[9]

Why is there so much of this traffic?

Sending is cheap. XRPL.org says each transaction destroys a small amount of XRP “to protect the XRP Ledger from being disrupted by spam and denial-of-service attacks,” and that the cost rises with network load.[7] At normal load the cost is low enough that sending millions of orders or one-drop payments is affordable (our reasoning). What a transaction costs is set out on XRP transaction cost and speed.

What do defenders of the ledger say?

After a post on X called the XRP Ledger a “ghost chain” on the strength of Bitquery’s figures, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz replied: “Yes, it’s very cheap. Yes, you can use it for useful things and useless things. If it were more expensive and fewer people did low-value things on it, would that somehow make it better?” Lawyer Bill Morgan posted a Grok response that called the label “a rhetorical attack because the phrase is a slogan, not a metric.”[8] Neither disputed Bitquery’s counts in the remarks CoinGape quoted. Their point is that transaction counts are the wrong test of use, which is also where Bitquery’s own caveats lead. A measure built on value moved rather than transactions sent is discussed on measuring XRP’s actual use, and the growth case built on trade size is on is XRP Ledger usage growing or shrinking.