Ripple says XRP Ledger back online after hourlong network halt
Ripple’s technical chief, David Schwartz, said the company is investigating after its XRP Ledger paused for more than an hour on February 4.
Ripple’s XRP Ledger has recovered from a network outage that stopped validations from being broadcast for more than an hour, the company’s chief technical officer verified.
Network activity halted at block height 93927174 for 64 minutes before the blockchain was restarted on February 4 at 10:58 a.m. UTC, according to the XRPL explorer page.
“It appeared that consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart,” Ripple technical head David Schwartz said in a February 4 X post.
He noted that validator operators had to manually intervene to “choose a sane starting point” to create enough consensus to transition the network to a coordinated ledger stream. Schwartz stated that his observations were only preliminary, and Ripple was still looking into the main problem.
Schwartz remarked that only a few Unique Node List validators were forced to make changes to restart the network, “so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered.”
RippleX’s X account reported that user funds were protected throughout the incident.
According to XRPSCAN data, around 2 million transactions are conducted each day by anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 distinct senders.
As a result, the network outage may have delayed around 88,000 transactions.
The network outage generated speculation regarding Ripple’s centralized architecture after Daniel Keller, chief technical officer of XRPL node operator Eminence, stated that “all 35 nodes” were back validating transactions.
XRP Ledger’s centralization concerns have been a frequent subject of criticism, while alternative blockchains such as Ethereum continue to decentralize, with more than 1 million daily active validators ensuring the network.
XRP $2.51 fell to a 24-hour low of $2.45 during the XRP Ledger network outage, but has now recovered 3.2% to $2.53 as of writing, according to CoinGecko data.
Since Donald Trump’s victory in the US election, the token has increased by 396%, making it one of the industry’s top performers.
XRP Ledger’s network outage comes as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse advocates for XRP to be designated as a US reserve asset, which Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks will look into.
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