XRP Ledger’s Unexpected Siesta: Ripple CTO Explains

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The XRP Ledger (XRPL) took an unexpected one-hour nap on February 4, leaving the community in a bit of a tizzy. But fear not, dear reader, for Ripple‘s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, aka “JoelKatz,” swooped in to save the day with some preliminary findings and a dash of humor.

XRP Ledger’s Surprise Snooze

Blockchain explorers confirmed that the ledger froze at block height 93927174 for 64 minutes before validators managed to reboot it at 10:58 am UTC. This, of course, raised eyebrows and questions within the XRP community about the cause of the disruption.

Schwartz took to X to reassure users and share his initial observations. “The network is now recovering. We don’t know exactly what caused the issue yet,” he wrote. “Super-preliminary observation: It looked like consensus was running but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart.”

He added that once a few validations were issued by several sources, the network managed to re-establish consensus, bringing the ledger back on track. However, he emphasized the preliminary nature of these findings: “Once servers started seeing a few validations from a few sources, they were able to build enough consensus to pull the network over to a coordinated ledger stream after the last ledger the network managed to validate. This is all preliminary and might turn out to be wrong.”

Following up on the root cause, Schwartz noted: “Very few UNL operators actually made any changes, as far as I can tell, so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered. I’m not sure yet.” Later, he offered a further update: “Update: It looks like, as far as we can tell, only one validator operator manually intervened. It’s still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or the network self-healed.”

RippleX, the developer-focused arm of Ripple Labs, also chimed in: “The XRP Ledger has resumed forward progress — the RippleX team is investigating the root cause and will provide updates as soon as possible. Reminder: your funds were always safe!”

While the XRPL is known for its speed and reliability, this outage serves as a reminder of the broader realities of distributed ledger systems. This is not the first time the XRPL has faced technical difficulties. Over the past year, the ledger encountered a node crash in November 2024 and suffered full history node failures in September of the same year.

At press time, XRP traded at $2.4979.

XRP Ledger’s Unexpected Siesta: Ripple CTO Explains with a Hint of Humor

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2025-02-05 21:36