The XRP Ledger halted block production for over an hour on February 4 before spontaneously recovering — marking a rare network disruption for one of the crypto industry’s oldest blockchains. Developers confirmed that no customer funds were lost during the network halt.
XRP Ledger Faces Significant Technical Failure
Network activity of the XRP Ledger froze at block height 93927173 for 64 minutes, affecting the network’s ability to process and record transactions. The occurrence prompted an immediate investigation.
“It looked like consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart,” Ripple technology chief David Schwartz said on X. “Very few UNL operators actually made any changes, as far as I can tell, so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered.”
Schwartz further noted that validator operators had to manually intervene to “choose a sane starting point” to create enough consensus to pull the network to a coordinated ledger stream.
While XRPL has since resumed normal operations, Schwartz indicated that Ripple was still investigating the root cause of the network halt as his observations were merely preliminary.
According to the Ripple CTO, very few Unique Node List validators were forced to make changes to reboot the network, “so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered.”
No User Funds Lost
The XRPL failure also sparked concerns about the safety of user funds, as approximately 80,000 transactions were delayed due to the incident. However, Schwartz quickly clarified that customer assets were not affected.
“It just caused ledgers not to be seen as trusted for about an hour,” Schwartz postulated. “The servers knew the network wasn’t working correctly and so did not report any ledgers as trusted during the incident.”
The XRP Ledger’s network failure comes as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse advocates for XRP to be included as a US strategic reserve asset, which President Trump’s crypto czar, David Sacks, will explore.
According to CoinGecko data, XRP slumped to as low as $2.45 on the heels of the XRPL’s halt on Tuesday. The industry’s third-largest token has since recovered slightly to $2.53 as of publication time. XRP is still 25.5% away from its all-time high of $3.40, registered back in January 2018.
