Ripple’s blockchain had a little hiccup but is back on its feet now! On February 5, Ripple’s tech guru, David Schwartz, shared the good news that the network is recovering from a brief outage.
Blackout
So, here’s what went down, as on February 4, the XRP Ledger experienced a rare one-hour outage when block production came to a halt at ledger height 93927173.
The network managed to bounce back all on its own without any major rescue missions from validators.
Schwartz noted that while consensus was happening, validations weren’t being published, which led to a bit of chaos, think of it as the network drifting apart like a group of friends who can’t agree on where to eat.
Interestingly, very few Unique Node List operators made any changes during this time, suggesting that the network might have spontaneously recovered.
A UNL is basically a trusted directory of validators that keeps everything running smoothly on the XRPL.
Nodes on the network
Once some servers started seeing validations from a handful of sources, they were able to regroup and pull the network back together.
Schwartz explained that they’re still piecing together what happened, but thankfully no assets were lost during this little drama, just some ledgers that weren’t seen as trustworthy for about an hour.
This outage comes at a time when Ripple is shaking things up. They recently slashed their base reserve requirement from 10 XRP to just 1 XRP and tweaked their validator structure to limit Ripple’s influence to only 2 out of 35 validators.
Action and reaction
XRP had some trouble, as the price took a relatively big dip of about 10%, dropping to $2.45 after the incident.
At the time of writing, it was trading at $2.49, down 26% from its peak of $3.38 in mid-January.
XRP had already taken a hit earlier when Donald Trump’s trade tariffs were announced over the weekend but managed to claw its way back up to nearly $2.80 on February 4.
Despite these ups and downs, Ripple’s token has shown impressive growth over the past year, skyrocketing almost 400% since this time last year, most of that surge happening in just the last three months thanks to some optimistic shifts in American politics for crypto companies.
