XRP Ledger goes offline but speculators don't seem to care
Another major blockchain has temporarily gone offline, speculators seem unfazed by the fact that the chain appears to be less reliable now.
By Noam Galai/Getty Images
Another major blockchain has temporarily gone offline, potentially preventing thousands of transactions from happening on time. However, once again, speculators seem unfazed by the fact that the chain appears to be less reliable now.
This time, XRP Ledger, on which the popular XRP token operates, went down for 64 minutes in the final hours of February 4th, stopping transaction processing. While the network seems to be operational at the time of writing, the cause of the problem has not yet been revealed, and the team is also unsure what fixed it.
In an update this morning (UTC time), David Schwartz, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ripple, the company associated with XRP, said, "It looks like, as far as we can tell, only one validator operator manually intervened," and admitted, "It's still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or if the network self-healed."
In his "super-preliminary observation," Schwartz speculated yesterday that "It looked like consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart." Therefore, validators of the network, who are responsible for validating transactions, had to manually intervene. However, as noted by the CTO, only one validator did so.
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Meanwhile, it was also revealed that the network responsible for securing XRP, which now boasts a market capitalization of $144 billion, has only 35 nodes that validate, relay, and process transactions, helping maintain the ledger. For comparison, at the time of writing, bitcoin (BTC) has 21,695 reachable nodes, while ethereum (ETH) has 5,709.
In any case, RippleX, the provider of tools for XRPL developers, claims that XRP funds "are always safe."
The market seems unbothered by the fact that the network stopped operating, as the price of XRP has largely moved with the rest of the market. XRP is down 3% in a day and 20% in a week, trimming its annual gains to 395%.
XRPL is not the only major blockchain that has gone offline. Solana (SOL), another popular chain, has gone offline on multiple occasions. However, this did not prevent its token from becoming one of the top performers in the crypto market.
Meanwhile, Ethereum experienced a major outage in 2020, while bitcoin had two downtime events – one in 2010 and one in 2013. Since then, bitcoin has been 100% operational.