XRP Ledger āSelf-Healedā After Brief Downtime
The XRP Ledger (XRPL) was briefly unavailable early Wednesday as a consensus mechanism design led to a temporary halt in network operations.
The incident began when the networkās consensus process appeared to function, but validations were not being published, causing the networkās ledgers to ādrift apart.ā
In the XRP Ledger, consensus among validators is crucial for updating the ledger with new transactions. If validators cannot agree on which transactions to include in the next ledger version, the network canāt move forward.
A ādriftā in this context means that while the consensus protocol was technically running, validations (or confirmations of transaction sets) werenāt being published.
At least one validator operator manually intervened to reset the networkās consensus to a previously validated ledger state, although the network seemed to have rectified the problem independently, Ripple CTO David Schwarz said in a X post after the incident.
āItās likely that servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong,ā Schwarz said. āAnd wanted to make sure no server accepted a ledger as fully validated when they couldnāt be sure the network would retain and eventually agree on that ledger.
āOne possible failure mode for XRPL is if all the validators think somethingās wrong with the network, all refuse to send any validations, and then thereās no chatter to let the network reconverge. This is the āsilent networkā failure,ā Schwarz added.
No assets were at risk during the downtime, with XRP prices largely in line with broader bitcoin and altcoin movements.
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