The XRP Ledger (XRPL) skilled a community halt that lasted for simply over an hour earlier than efficiently resuming operations, in response to statements printed by Ripple’s Chief Expertise Officer, David Schwartz. The incident, which befell on February 4, noticed the ledger freeze at block top 93927174 for 64 minutes earlier than validators efficiently rebooted it at 10:58 am UTC.
XRP Ledger Halted For 1 Hour
Blockchain explorers affirm that no new validations have been printed through the halt, elevating instant questions all through the XRP group about the reason for the disruption. Moments after community exercise resumed, Schwartz—also referred to as “JoelKatz”—took to X to reassure customers and share preliminary findings.
“The network is now recovering. We don’t know exactly what caused the issue yet,” Schwartz wrote. “Super-preliminary observation: It looked like consensus was running but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart. Validator operators manually intervened to choose a sane starting point (after the last ledger that anyone could have seen as fully validated) and begin publishing validations from there. (This can be done without coordination, but it’s always better to get second and third opinions.)”
He added that after just a few validations have been issued by a number of sources, the community managed to re-establish consensus, bringing the ledger again on observe. Nonetheless, he emphasised the preliminary nature of those 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 basis trigger, Schwartz famous: “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 supplied an additional replace: “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.”
Shortly after operations resumed, RippleX—the developer-focused arm of Ripple Labs—additionally weighed 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!”
Though the XRPL has a popularity for velocity and reliability, this outage underscores the broader realities of distributed ledger methods, the place validator and consensus behaviors stay essential for community stability. This isn’t the primary time the XRPL has confronted technical difficulties. Over the previous 12 months, the ledger encountered a node crash in November 2024 and suffered full historical past node failures in September of the identical 12 months.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.4979.
Featured picture from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com