XRP Ledger Temporarily Halts Block Production, Ripple CTO Cites Possible Network 'Drift'

The XRP Ledger halted block production for about an hour on Tuesday before spontaneously recovering, marking a rare disruption for one of crypto's oldest networks.

Network activity froze at ledger height 93927173, prompting an immediate investigation from validators. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) has since resumed normal operations, with no loss of assets or transactions reported.

“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. "Very few UNL operators actually made any changes, as far as I can tell, so it's possible the network spontaneously recovered." 

Schwartz is referring to the Unique Node List (UNL), a core component of the XRPL consensus mechanism that acts as a trusted validator directory to ensure network integrity and transaction finality.

In January 2023, the XRPL Foundation removed a Ripple-operated validator from its UNL to comply with a "one entity, one validator" policy, lowering Ripple’s influence to 2 out of 34 validators at the time. 

A subsequent update in March of that year expanded the UNL to 36 validators by adding community-run nodes. The quorum threshold remained at 80% of trusted validators. An unresponsive validator from the University of Korea was also removed at the time, bringing the count to 35.

However, critics are quick to point out that this decision would have eventually backfired. Daniel Keller, CTO of XRPL node operator Eminence, responded to those concerns shortly after the halt, saying that "all 35 nodes are proposing."

The incident also sparked concerns about transaction safety, but Schwartz was quick to clarify no assets were at risk.

"It just caused ledgers not to be seen as trusted for about an hour,” Schwartz noted. “The servers knew the network wasn't working correctly and so did not report any ledgers as trusted during the incident.”

The disruption comes amid broader changes in the XRP Ledger ecosystem.

Over the past year, the network has faced technical challenges, including a node crash in November 2024 and full history node failures in September of the same year that required emergency patches.

XRP was down 8.3% on the day to $2.52, CoinGecko data shows.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair