XRP Ledger Briefly Pauses but Recovers on Its Own, Ripple CTO Explains
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) experienced a brief outage early Wednesday due to a consensus mechanism issue that temporarily halted network operations.
The disruption occurred when the network’s consensus process was active, but validators failed to publish validations, causing ledger states to diverge. In the XRPL, validators play a crucial role in confirming transactions and ensuring agreement on the next ledger version. Without this consensus, the network cannot process new transactions.
In this case, while the consensus protocol was still running, validations weren’t being broadcasted, leading to a temporary “drift” between ledger versions.
According to Ripple CTO David Schwartz, at least one validator operator manually reset the network’s consensus to a previously validated ledger state. However, he noted that the network appeared to have resolved the issue independently.
“It’s likely that validators intentionally withheld validations because they recognized something was wrong,” Schwartz explained in a post on X. “They wanted to prevent any server from accepting a ledger as fully validated when they weren’t sure the network would ultimately reach agreement.”
Schwartz also highlighted a potential failure mode for XRPL, where all validators stop sending validations if they detect an issue, leading to a “silent network” scenario where the system struggles to reconverge.
Despite the brief disruption, no assets were at risk, and XRP’s price remained stable, moving in line with broader crypto market trends.
