Lesson 1
Learning the basics of requests on the XRPL
Reading and writing on the ledger
What is a request on the XRP Ledger, and how is it different from a transaction?
On the XRPL, there are two primary things you can do when connecting to the Ledger: make requests or create signed transactions. A signed transaction changes something on the ledger, whereas a request is used to look something up. Think of a request as a query sent to the XRPL to gather information, like account details or some data stored on the ledger from a previous transaction. It’s important to note that requests don’t require any XRP for fees; they are free to the public!
In simple terms:
Transactions change something on the ledger, while requests look something up.
Requests are ‘read-only’
A request is non-destructive, meaning it can only read information on the ledger, and it never changes what’s there. This functionality is important because it allows you to access the ledger without worrying about making changes.
Imagine you want to look up how much XRP you have in your account or look up when a certain transaction happened. As long as you have the account’s address number or the transaction, you can query the ledger to see what’s there.
What makes a transaction “signed”?
Transactions on the XRP Ledger always involve making changes to the ledger, and usually have to do with moving value from one place to another. Sometimes a transaction could just be making a change to an account’s setting, like setting up multi-signing or adding, changing or disabling a key pair. But most commonly it could be a range of actions, like making an XRP payment, creating a buy offer for an NFT, or creating a trust line for receiving another type of fungible token.
Let’s imagine you want to buy something online with XRP. When you create the transaction, it will contain the recipient’s account address, your account address, the amount of XRP being sent, and the type of transaction (a payment in this case). Before the payment is broadcasted to the network, the signing algorithm uses data from the transaction along with your private key to create a digital signature. This process labels the transaction as ‘signed’.
Now that we have a little background on requests and signed transactions, in the next lesson we’re going to take a look at a few projects that can help you explore information on the XRP Ledger.
