The XRP Ledger paused block production for about an hour on Tuesday before recovering independently, marking a rare disruption for one of the oldest crypto networks.
The issue, which occurred at block height 93927174, froze network activity for 64 minutes before being resolved on 4th February at 10.58 am UTC. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) has since resumed normal operation, and according to our records, there was no loss of assets or transactions.
“It looked like consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart,” David Schwartz, CTO of XRPL, said on X.
He added that very few UNL operators actually made any changes, as far as he could tell, so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered.
Here, Schwartz refers to the Unique Node List (UNL), a core component of the XRPL consensus mechanism that serves as a trusted validator directory to help verify the network integrity and transaction finality.
Manual intervention restores stability as 88,000 transactions face delays
According to Schwartz, the validator operators had to intervene manually to establish a stable starting point, enabling the network to regain synchronization.
However, the disturbance affected about 88,000 transactions, according to XRPSCAN, which shows that the network processes about 2 million transactions every day from 30,000 to 60,000 unique senders. RippleX, the company’s development arm, has also come out to reassure customers that their funds were safe during the incident.
The problem also brought up the question of the extent to which the XRP Ledger is centralized, with critics pointing out that all 35 nodes picked up validation at once. The CTO of Eminence, an XRPL node operator, Daniel Keller, pointed to this as evidence that the network is dependent on a small set of validators compared to a decentralized blockchain like Ethereum, which has more than 1 million daily active validators.
XRPL faces structural changes amid validator controversy
At the beginning of last year, the XRPL Foundation shut down a validator operated by Ripple to uphold its policy of one entity, one validator, which at the time reduced Rippler’s influence to 2 out of 34 validators.
In March of that year, a follow-up update expanded the scope of the UNL to 36 validators by adding community-run nodes while keeping the quorum threshold at 80% of trusted validators.
Concurrently, an unresponsive validator from the University of Korea was excluded, reducing the total number of validators to 35. However, critics are quick to point out that this decision would have eventually backfired.
But Schwartz was quick to point out that no assets were at risk. He explained that it simply meant that for about an hour, ledgers were not being considered as trusted. He also said that the servers knew the network was broken, so they didn’t submit any ledgers as trusted during the incident.
The outage takes place against the background of other changes in the XRP Ledger ecosystem. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) is to change significantly with the introduction of Multi-Purpose Tokens (MPTs) with the help of the XLS-33 proposal. Multi-purpose tokens are a single system of seamless transactions, securities, and even NFTs, all within one umbrella.
The voting was opened, and the developers can decide on the possible effects of the MPTs. The MPT functionality is available on the XRPL Devnet, and developers can build compliance controls, on-chain metadata, tokenization, and other features. A published metadata schema describes how to organize token data so that applications can work together without a problem.
Ripple’s extensive performance testing of MPT transactions aims to ensure that introducing this feature will not impact the XRP Ledger’s capacity to handle other types of transactions.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/xrp-ledger-faces-rare-outage/