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| ledgers.html | understanding-xrpl.html | The XRP Ledger is a blockchain that records transactions of XRP and other tokens between accounts. |
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Ledgers
The XRP Ledger is a global distributed blockchain that is open to all. Individual participants can trust the integrity of the ledger without having to trust any single institution to manage it. The rippled server software accomplishes this by managing a ledger database that can only be updated according to very specific rules.
Each instance of rippled keeps a full copy of the ledger. The peer-to-peer network of rippled servers distributes candidate transactions to all other rippled servers. The consensus process determines which transactions are applied to each new version of the ledger.
The shared global ledger is a series of individual ledger versions that rippled keeps in its internal database. Every ledger version has a Ledger Index value that identifies the order of ledger versions. Each permanent, closed ledger version has a unique, identifying hash value.
At any given time, a rippled instance has an in-progress open ledger, a number of closed ledgers that have not yet been approved, and any number of ledgers that have been validated by consensus. Only the validated ledgers are certain to be correct and immutable. The following table summarizes the difference:
A single ledger version consists of three parts:
- A header - The Ledger Index, hashes of its other contents, and other metadata.
- A transaction tree - The transactions that were applied to the previous ledger version to create this version. Transactions are the only way to change the ledger.
- A state tree - All the ledger objects that contain the settings, balances, and objects in the ledger as of this version.
See Ledger Structure for a complete description of the elements of an XRP Ledger object.