According to BitInfoCharts, transactions on the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap skyrocketed to an all-time high of 3.53 million on Friday, soaring past its previous high of 1.70 million, which was set back in January.
The transactions are well ahead of BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC, with Ethereum coming in behind XRP at 794,000 transactions in the last 24 hours.
Big data analyst and Forbes contributor Thomas Silkjær, says the XRP Ledger is being bombarded with payments that serve no purpose other than to spam the network.
“The XRPL is currently processing roughly 90 transactions per second while being ‘under attack’ by countless payments serving no purpose, other than burning fees.
The minimum fee has increased by 2 drops (or ~USD 0,000045).”
After tracking the path of the transactions, Silkjær says he believes one person is sending huge numbers of IOUs across the ledger. The XRP Ledger features a built-in decentralized exchange with an IOU system that’s designed to give people a way to trade any type of asset electronically.
Silkjær believes whoever is sending the transactions has spent 40,000 XRP worth about $9,200 in the process.
“Somebody has spent 40K+ XRP to activate more than 2000 accounts, that is slowly burning away all the account reserve by sending non-XRP payment transactions.
This is actually a funny thing about the XRPL. If you have IOUs, you cannot risk, not being able to spend it, even if your account reserve is low. As long as you have enough XRP left in the account to pay for fees, you can spend it.
No matter the purpose of this activity, we’re watching a distributed network handling it perfectly. Bravo!”
You can track transactions on the ledger in real-time via the XRP Ledger Livenet here.