Send & Receive XRP

Overview

You have a wallet. Now comes the moment that makes the whole thing real: actually moving money. In this module you'll send your first XRP payment and receive one back — and you'll understand each piece of the process instead of just clicking buttons and hoping.

We'll do this safely, using "practice money" that costs nothing, so there's zero risk while you learn. By the end you'll know how to address a payment, what the small fee is for, why your wallet always keeps a little XRP set aside, and how to look up any payment and confirm it truly happened. No coding — just you, your wallet app, and a few minutes.

Practice with play money first

Before sending anything that has real value, everyone — beginners and experts alike — practices on a separate copy of the network called the Testnet. Think of it as a flight simulator: it works exactly like the real thing, but the XRP isn't worth anything, so mistakes don't cost you.

To get some, you visit a faucet — a free dispenser that drops test XRP into a wallet for you. (It's called a faucet because you "turn it on" and free coins pour out.) Your wallet app, Xaman, lets you switch into Testnet mode; once you're there, the faucet tops you up with plenty of test XRP to play with.

The golden rule of the rest of this module: do everything on Testnet first. When a real payment one day matters, you'll already have the muscle memory.

Addresses: the account number of the XRP world

To send money to someone, you need to know where it's going. On the XRP Ledger, every wallet has an address — a string of letters and numbers that always starts with the letter r, like rPT1...k9Hn. It's the equivalent of an account number or an email address: it's how the network knows who you mean.

Two things worth burning into memory:

• Addresses are safe to share. Giving someone your address only lets them send you money — never take it. It's like handing out your account number so a friend can pay you back.
• Copy, never type. Addresses are long and easy to get wrong, and a payment sent to the wrong address generally cannot be undone. Always copy-and-paste, or scan the QR code your wallet shows. Xaman makes this easy: to receive, you show your QR code; to send, you scan theirs.

There's no "central directory" matching addresses to names, which is exactly why double-checking the address before you hit send matters so much.

The destination tag: which apartment in the building

Here's a wrinkle that confuses newcomers, so let's make it simple. Some addresses — especially those belonging to exchanges (the apps where people buy and sell crypto) — are shared by thousands of customers at once. The address gets the payment to the right building, but the company still needs to know which customer inside it belongs to.

That's what a destination tag is: a short number, like an apartment number on top of a street address. The street address gets your money to the building; the tag makes sure it lands in the right mailbox.

When do you need one?

• Sending to an exchange or a service? They'll give you a destination tag. Include it, or your money can get lost in a sea of other deposits. This is the single most common beginner mistake — don't skip it.
• Sending to a friend's personal wallet? Usually no tag is needed. If your wallet doesn't ask for one, you're fine.

When in doubt, ask the person or service you're paying whether a destination tag is required.

Fees and the reserve: two small amounts of XRP

Two things will gently nibble at your balance, and both are normal. Knowing what they are saves a lot of confusion.

The transaction fee. Every payment costs a tiny amount of XRP — a fraction of a cent — that gets destroyed (not paid to any company). Why? It's a speed bump against spam: if flooding the network with junk costs real money, nobody bothers. The fee is so small you'll barely notice it, and in return your payment settles in just a few seconds.

The reserve. The XRP Ledger asks every wallet to keep a small minimum amount of XRP parked in it that you can't spend down to zero. This is the reserve, and it exists to discourage people from creating millions of junk accounts that would bloat the shared record everyone has to store. There's a base amount just for having a wallet, and a little extra gets reserved each time you add certain features to your account. The practical takeaway: your wallet will never let you empty itself completely, and that's by design — the reserve isn't a fee, it's just your XRP, held in place. (The exact amounts can change over time, so trust the number your wallet shows you.)

Sending, receiving, and proving it happened

Now the fun part. A payment goes like this:

1. Receiver shares their address (a QR code in Xaman is easiest).
2. Sender enters the address and the amount, adds a destination tag if one was requested, and reviews the screen carefully.
3. Sender approves the payment by signing it in the wallet — a tap or a swipe. This is the wallet using your secret key behind the scenes; you never see or type the key itself.
4. A few seconds later, it's done. The receiver's balance goes up. No "pending for 3 business days," no middleman.

How do you know it worked? Every payment gets a unique receipt called a transaction hash — a long code that's a permanent fingerprint of that exact transaction. Paste it into the Testnet Explorer (a public website that lets anyone look up any transaction) and you'll see the whole story: who sent what to whom, the fee, the timestamp, and a big green "successful." This is the blockchain's superpower in action — anyone, anywhere, can independently verify a payment really happened. You're not taking a company's word for it; you're checking the shared record yourself.

Check

You're done when you've sent a small test payment from your own wallet and confirmed it on the explorer. Practice on Testnet: get test XRP from the faucet, send a little to a classmate or to a second wallet you control, and then look the payment up.

For your artifact, grab the transaction hash of your payment (or a screenshot of it) on the Testnet Explorer and submit that. If you can find your own payment, read off its fee, and explain in a sentence why your wallet still has a little XRP it won't let you spend, you've got this.