Ripple CTO Explains XRP Ledger’s Recent Failure

The XRP Ledger recently experienced a significant technical failure, halting block production for roughly an hour. 

According to Ripple CTO David Schwartz, the network is currently recovering. 

Schwartz has added that it is not clear what exactly caused the severe technical failure, but he believes that the network drifted apart due to validators not being published.

Validators had to be published from a “sane” starting point after the network stopped. The network started operating again after enough consensus was built. 

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However, Schwartz also does not rule out that the “super-preliminary” observation might end up being wrong.

It is even possible that the network managed to recover “spontaneously.” 

“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,” Schwartz said. 

He has also added that no ledger with majority validation has been lost. “We don’t know the details yet, but it’s likely that servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong…” he added.

Bitcoiners gloat over the XRPL’s failure  

The XRPL’s technical failure was used by some members of the Bitcoin community to poke fun at XRP. “Thankfully the XRPL being offline is not affecting any banks since no banks use it,” one commentator quipped.

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However, Schwartz claims that the Bitcoin network also had two network-level failure incidents in the past. 

“Bitcoin frequently goes an hour without confirming any transactions, and Bitcoin had two network-level failure incidents, one in 2010 for 8 hours and one in 2013 for 6 hours,” he said. 

As reported by U.Today, the two communities have been at loggerheads over the past several weeks over the composition of the US crypto reserve. 

Meanwhile, the price of XRP is down more than 6%. The token is currently underperforming the rest of the top 10 due to the recent technical failure.