XRP Ledger Metrics Do Not Establish How Many People Returned

XRP Ledger activity measures track ledger activity, but they do not establish how many individual people were active or whether they returned after a period of inactivity.

The active-account measure counts unique senders. Funded addresses map to ledger accounts; unfunded ones are not accounts, and account records do not verify anyone’s identity. The total therefore describes ledger activity, not a verified count of people.

A separate active-users measure includes source and destination activity, along with destination-tag activity. The measures cover different kinds of ledger activity, and neither shows when an address last transacted.

Destination tags help distinguish payments for different users routed through a multipurpose address. They do not, by themselves, identify who controls an address.

An earlier XRP Ledger account-growth story about newly activated accounts illustrates the same distinction: an account count does not establish how many people joined or returned.