As a public good, the Ripple network must be accessible to people around the world. As the price of XRP has risen, we recognize the reserve requirement to create ledger entries has become a barrier to entry for some people. The current base reserve is 50 XRP and the reserve for each “charged item” (e.g. a trust line, offer) is 12.5 XRP. The purpose of reserve requirements is to prevent ledger spam so they should be a nominal amount.

To align reserves with the current trading price of XRP, we propose changing the base reserve to 20 XRP and charged item reserve to 5 XRP, which preserves the current base: charged item ratio.

We will float this proposal to the network and then it’ll be up to the validators to vote on the change for it to go into effect. Right now, Ripple Labs oversees the majority of validators on unique node lists (UNLs) but we’re working to add validators operated by a variety of organizations and individuals.

How Validators Vote on Reserve Levels

On the Ripple network, validators “vote” for new reserve levels. Administrators can configure their Ripple servers to vote for reserve levels they believe are appropriate. Prior to the vote, validators announce their desired reserve levels in their validations, making their desires public and allowing other validators to see what reserve levels have sufficient supports. Validators can then inject “pseudo-transactions” into the consensus process to change the reserve level. Any pseudo-transaction included by a majority of weighted trust will survive into the consensus ledger, changing the reserve level.

Currently, administrators set their preferred fee levels by changing a line of code in the ‘Application.cpp’ file.

People who run validators are welcome to adjust these levels as they believe are appropriate. Their preferences will be made public in their validations. Ripple Labs will put our preferred levels in the default server installation.

Updated on Dec 4, 2013 at 3:40pm PT to fix formatting.