A network floor, not a cashier rule
The XRP account reserve every casino address has to keep
Every XRP Ledger account, including a casino's own deposit address, must hold a base reserve it cannot send away. That floor is set by the network, and it is a separate thing from anything a casino decides on its own.
An XRP account reserve is a floor the ledger holds under every account that exists on it. Nobody sends it anywhere, nobody collects it, and no casino chooses the number. It is simply the part of a balance the network will not let leave, for as long as the account exists at all.
That single rule applies the same way to a personal wallet and to the deposit address a casino publishes for you to send to. The address on a cashier screen is, from the ledger's point of view, an account like any other, and it answers to the same reserve rule as everyone else's.
What the XRP account reserve is for
The XRP Ledger keeps a public record of every account, and keeping that record has a cost the network recovers by locking value rather than by charging a fee. An account that wants to exist on the ledger has to hold a minimum amount that stays put. Nothing about that amount is decided by a casino, a wallet provider, or a payment processor — it is a rule of the ledger itself, and it applies before any operator's own terms even enter the picture. The mechanics of the wider ledger, including how it settles a payment at all, are laid out on the XRP Ledger page.
This is why a wallet's displayed balance and the amount it can actually send are two different figures. The reserve sits between them. It is not moved, not spent, and not returned to anyone — it simply stops being part of what the account can pay out, right up until the account itself is closed.
A casino's own minimum is a different rule
It helps to keep two things apart, because a cashier's own document can print a number that looks similar and means something else entirely. Bitcasino.io's help-centre table, for instance, sets a 0.31 XRP minimum deposit — a figure the operator chose, printed in the operator's own document, and changeable by the operator at any time. That is a cashier rule.
The XRP account reserve is not that kind of number. Nobody wrote it into a casino's terms, no operator can lower it to attract deposits, and no operator can raise it either. It exists at the ledger layer, underneath any cashier's own policy, and it would apply to that same deposit address even if the casino had never opened it.
Confusing the two is an easy mistake, because both show up as “a number a wallet can't send.” A cashier's minimum deposit or minimum balance is a business choice, printed somewhere in the operator's own terms or help pages, and it can differ from one casino to the next or change without notice. The XRP account reserve is a protocol constant that every account carries regardless of who opened it or what it is used for.
The casino's own deposit address is not exempt
A common assumption is that an operator's own wallet, being run by a business rather than an individual, would somehow sit outside the reserve rule. It does not. The address that appears on a deposit screen is an account on the same ledger as everyone else's, and the reserve applies to it exactly as it applies to a personal wallet. The operator cannot switch it off for its own convenience, and nothing in an operator's terms changes what the ledger itself requires.
What an operator's terms can do is add rules on top — a minimum deposit, a minimum withdrawal, a threshold before a bonus applies. Those are business decisions, made by a business, and printed wherever that business chooses to print them. The reserve is not one of those decisions. Reading which numbers on a cashier page are the operator's own choice and which are dictated by the ledger is part of the wider task described on depositing XRP at a casino.
Why this site does not print a specific reserve figure
Some XRP Ledger facts change the same way for every account on the network, and a precise reserve amount is one of them — except that the network is also free to adjust that amount over time through its own governance process, which means a number printed today could be stale tomorrow without any casino, wallet, or reader doing anything wrong. This site's reading window, described on how this site is built, did not capture a dated, first-party figure for the reserve amount itself, so none is printed here.
That is not the same as saying the reserve does not exist or that it is small enough to ignore. The rule — a floor every account must hold, set by the network, unrelated to any casino — is on file and stated plainly throughout this page. What is missing is a specific number with a capture date attached, and rather than borrow one from memory or from another site's write-up, this page leaves that particular figure blank, the same way any other unconfirmed number would be left blank anywhere else on this site.
If you need the current reserve amount for a specific transfer, the ledger itself is the only source that will not go stale — a block explorer or a wallet that reads live network parameters will show the figure the network is actually enforcing right now, rather than a number fixed at whatever date an article happened to be written.
What “cannot send away” does and does not restrict
Holding a reserve does not stop an account from being used. It does not block deposits, it does not block a casino from crediting a balance, and it does not prevent the account from receiving further XRP at all — the restriction applies only to the specific slice of the balance the reserve occupies, not to the account's ability to function.
What it restricts is a single kind of transaction: one that would take the account's remaining balance below the reserve floor. A payment that leaves enough behind goes through in the ordinary way, settled by the ledger like any other transfer, described in full on the XRP Ledger page. A payment that would dip beneath the floor is the one the ledger will not process, and that refusal comes from the network's own rule rather than from any casino's cashier software rejecting the request.
This is also why the reserve is not something a casino's own support desk can waive on request. Support staff at an operator can explain a casino's own minimum deposit or withdrawal rule, because that rule belongs to the operator. The reserve belongs to the ledger, and no operator, however accommodating, has a lever that changes it.
Why this matters when a balance looks “short”
The most common place this surfaces is when someone tries to move an entire balance out of a wallet in one payment and finds a small amount left behind, or unable to be included. That leftover amount is very often the reserve doing exactly what it is meant to do — holding the account open — rather than a sign of anything wrong with the payment, the wallet software, or a casino's cashier.
Because the reserve is a ledger-level fact, it will show up the same way regardless of which casino's deposit address is on the other end of a transfer, or whether a casino is involved at all. It is not a symptom to chase down in an operator's support queue; it is a constant of the network that any XRP account carries.
The vocabulary this topic leans on — account, ledger, drop — is collected in one place on the glossary. For how this site sources and dates what it says about the ledger versus what it says about any one operator, see how this site is built.
None of this is a casino rule, and the full scored comparison of operators that separately name XRP sits at best ripple casinos.