Reference
What actually happens when you send a payment on the XRP Ledger
Five things the protocol does that most explanations skip. No opinions, no product. Each one is checkable against a public ledger explorer in under a minute.
An address is not an account
On the XRP Ledger, one address can serve many people at once. A custodial service holds a single account and separates its users with a destination tag, a 32-bit unsigned integer carried alongside the payment. The ledger stores that tag in the transaction; it never creates a second address.
This is why the same address can appear in thousands of deposit screens and still route correctly. The address answers where. The tag answers who.
A payment without its routing field still succeeds
This is the part that surprises people. Sending to a custodial address without the destination tag is not rejected by the network. The transaction validates, the funds move, and they land in a pooled account with nothing to say whose they are.
The XRP Ledger offers an account flag, RequireDest, which makes the network refuse a payment carrying no tag. It is opt-in, and an account that has not set it accepts untagged payments silently.
Memos and tags are not the same field
Stellar carries a memo, and it has types: MEMO_ID for a number, MEMO_TEXT for a short string, plus hash and return variants. A wallet that sends the right digits under the wrong type can be read by the receiver as a different value, or not read at all.
The XRP Ledger destination tag has one form: an integer. There is no text variant to get wrong.
An XRP Ledger account cannot be emptied to zero
Every account must hold a base reserve, and every object it owns, such as a trust line or an offer, adds an owner reserve on top. Those amounts are set by validator consensus and have been lowered over the years. The reserve is not a fee: it is not paid to anyone, it simply cannot be sent away while the account exists.
The practical consequence: the spendable balance of an account is always its balance minus its current reserve, and a wallet showing the raw balance is showing a number you cannot fully move.
Finality is a ledger close, not a confirmation count
Bitcoin-style chains express settlement as a number of blocks on top. The XRP Ledger validates a new ledger version every few seconds through consensus among validators, and once a ledger is validated the transactions in it are final. There is no deeper burial that makes them more final.
So the honest question to ask about an XRP payment is not how many confirmations it has. It is whether the ledger that contains it has been validated.
Custodial and self-custody, stated plainly
Self-custody means the keys are yours: nobody can move the funds without you, and nobody can restore access if you lose them. Custodial means an operator holds the keys: recovery becomes possible, and so does operator failure.
Neither is a better answer in the abstract. They trade the same thing in opposite directions, and the trade is about who bears the loss when something goes wrong.