XRPL Deletion of Accounts Now Possible As Of May 8th 2020

The XRP Ledger is open-source technology that anyone can use.  You can use the tools and information to integrate with and contribute to the open-source platform.  The XRP Ledger is a decentralized cryptographic ledger, powered by a network of peer-to-peer servers. It is the home of XRP, a digital asset designed to bridge the many different currencies in use worldwide.

To sum this all up – your 20XRP that were needed to open a wallet are now recoverable upon deletion.  15 XRP would be recovered and 5 XRP would be burned as a transaction fee.  This amendment became enabled after maintaining a 80% consensus during the mandatory 15 day voting period.

From XRPL.org:

Deletion of Accounts

The DeletableAccounts amendment  makes it possible to delete accounts. If the DeletableAccounts amendment is not enabled, every funded account must remain in the XRP Ledger’s data tree forever.

To be deleted, an account must meet the following requirements:

• The account’s Sequence number plus 256 must be less than the current Ledger Index.
• The account must not be linked to any of the following types of ledger objects (as a sender or receiver):
  • Escrow
  • PayChannel
  • RippleState
  • Check 
• The account must own fewer than 1000 objects in the ledger.
• The AccountDelete transaction must pay a special transaction cost equal to at least the owner reserve for one item (currently 5 XRP).

After an account has been deleted, it can be re-created in the ledger through the normal method of creating accounts. An account that has been deleted and re-created is no different than an account that has been created for the first time.

Unlike Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, each new version of the XRP Ledger’s public ledger chain contains the full state of the ledger, which increases in size with each new account. For that reason, you should not create new XRP Ledger accounts unless necessary. You can recover some of an account’s 20 XRP reserve by deleting the account, but you must still destroy at least 5 XRP to do so.

Institutions who send and receive value on behalf of many users can use Source Tags and Destination Tags to distinguish payments from and to their customers while only using one (or a handful) of accounts in the XRP Ledger.

For the first time in history, an XRPL account has been deleted.

20 reserved XRP were released, 15 XRP were recovered and 5 XRP were burned as the transaction fee (as expected).

Thanks to @xrplorer for providing a very insightful view of the XRPL.https://t.co/bjiDUgVB9R pic.twitter.com/gtTWk1YP5V

— Arturo Portilla (@Arturo_P_A) May 8, 2020