Ripple’s XRP Ledger (XRPL) is back up and running after a pause that lasted roughly one hour, said the firm’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz on January 5 on platform X.
“The network is now recovering. We don’t know exactly what caused the issue yet.”
Schwartz’ “super-preliminary observation” was that validations on the XRPL were not published while consensus was still functioning.
XRPL Validators Stopped Publishing
Normally, the XRPL validators come to an agreement (consensus) on the state of the ledger and then publish validations to confirm this agreement.
Read more: Trump’s Trade War With Tariffs Could Send Bitcoin Price ‘Violently’ Higher: Analyst
In this case, it appears that the consensus process was ongoing, meaning validators were still attempting to agree on transactions to be applied to the ledger. However, they were not publishing these validations. This is critical because validations are proof that validators have agreed on a ledger version as being correct and final.
Schwartz said that operators then “manually intervened to choose a sane starting point”, meaning they manually select a point in the ledger history after the last ledger that was recognised as fully validated by any part of the network.
“This can be done without coordination, but it’s always better to get second and third opinions.”
Schwartz explained that as validations began to be published from this manually selected point, other servers in the network started to see these validations.
Investigation Ongoing, Funds SAFU
With validations coming from multiple trusted sources, the servers were able to rebuild enough consensus. This consensus is necessary for the network to function harmoniously, as it ensures all nodes agree on the current and correct state of the ledger.
He added that this is “all preliminary and might turn out to be wrong”.
The Ripple developer account posted on X, saying that funds were always safe and the issue would be investigated.
The price of XRP was down nevertheless, much in line with the broader crypto market. The coin is still the third largest by market cap but dropped in price just below $2.50 at the time of writing.
Read more: Solana-Based Token Launchpad Pump.fun Saw Record Revenue Last Month, Data Shows
The crypto market suffered from further volatility amid fears of a spread of the trade war between the US and China, as the Asian country vowed to retaliate against Trumps’ tariff threats.