XRP Ledger Recovers from Hour-Long Block Production Disruption

Technical anomaly halts network temporarily, but no transactions lost.

The XRP Ledger, one of the longest-running cryptocurrency networks, experienced a rare hour-long halt in block production on Tuesday, February 5, 2025. The disruption, occurring at ledger height 93927173, caused temporary uncertainty among users before the network autonomously recovered without any loss of assets or transactions.

David Schwartz, Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, took to social media platform X to explain the technical cause behind the halt. According to Schwartz, the network encountered a consensus validation issue where validators stopped publishing their validations, leading to what he described as “network drift.”

The XRP Ledger operates on a consensus mechanism that utilizes a Unique Node List (UNL), a trusted set of validators responsible for transaction finality and network integrity. During the incident, all 35 active validators were proposing transactions, but the network entered what Schwartz termed a “silent network” failure mode. In this state, validators detected potential issues and ceased sending validations to prevent incomplete or erroneous ledger confirmations.

Despite the downtime, Schwartz assured users that no assets were at risk. The servers appropriately recognized the network inconsistency and refrained from reporting ledgers as finalized, ensuring the safety of funds and transactions.

Community-driven services such as Xaman Wallet promptly informed users about the situation and confirmed when normal network operations resumed. The halt, though unexpected, reinforced the XRP Ledger’s built-in safeguards, which prevented any irreversible issues.

This event follows a series of technical challenges for the XRP Ledger over the past year. In November 2024, the network experienced a node crash, and in September 2024, full history node failures required urgent patches to stabilize the system.

The XRP Ledger’s validator ecosystem has undergone significant restructuring in recent years. In January 2023, the XRPL Foundation enforced a “one entity, one validator” policy, reducing Ripple’s direct influence on network operations. Later, in March 2023, the validator network expanded to 36 nodes before settling at 35 after the removal of an unresponsive validator from the University of Korea.

Following the halt, XRP’s market price dropped 8.3% to $2.52, as reported by CoinGecko. However, this decline aligned with broader crypto market trends rather than being solely attributed to the network disruption.

The system corrected itself without the need for major external intervention. While some validator operators attempted to manually reset the consensus state, the network autonomously resumed normal operation, highlighting the resilience of its decentralized infrastructure.

During the downtime, transaction processing was temporarily paused, but no pending transactions were lost. Once block production resumed, all queued transactions were processed as usual, with no lingering network effects.

To further improve network efficiency, XRP Ledger validators approved an update to reserve requirements in December 2024, reducing the base reserve from 10 XRP to 1 XRP. This adjustment made account activation more accessible at current price levels.

Technical teams continue to investigate the root cause of the consensus validation issue to ensure similar incidents can be mitigated in the future. As of now, the XRP Ledger remains fully operational, demonstrating its ability to recover from unexpected anomalies while maintaining security and reliability.

photo source / Blockonome