One of the largest surges in account deletions ever recorded was observed on the decentralised XRP Ledger (XRPL), a ledger connected to Ripple.
The well-known cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, which purportedly terminated over 15,000 old XRP accounts and subsequently recovered almost 275,000 XRP coins, was mostly to blame for the increase.
According to Thomas Silkjaer, head of analytics and compliance at the XRP Ledger Foundation, the number of terminated accounts is rising, burning more than 30,000 XRP in fees as a result.
According to Silkjr, removing an XRPL account costs 2 XRP per account, which is equivalent to the owner’s reserve.
The amount of fees burnt is significant, taking into consideration Poloniex’s deletion of 15,000 accounts, and this amount might increase significantly considering that Poloniex is said to have a total of 84,000 accounts. 168,000 XRP might be burned if all of these accounts are terminated.
Unexpectedly, it seems the exchange had set up separate accounts for each of its users while keeping the required minimum reserve amount for each. The usage of destination tags, a function in the XRP Ledger that enables the effective grouping and identification of transactions to a certain party, appears to have led to this antiquated practise. Since then, Poloniex appears to have switched to a model based on destination tags.
