What Caused the Block Production Stop?

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) temporarily halted block production for approximately an hour on February 4 before spontaneously recovering. 

While the network is now fully operational, Ripple’s technical team is still investigating the root cause of the disruption.

XRP Ledger Halted Block Production

According to XRPL’s explorer page, network activity stalled at block height 93,927,174 for 64 minutes before resuming operations. 

The blockchain’s self-custody Xaman Wallet confirmed that XRPL was back online.

“The XRP ledger is now fully operational after the recent halt, and transactions can resume as normal,” the post read.

Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) David Schwartz addressed the issue in an X (formerly Twitter) post, explaining that while the network had recovered, the exact cause remained unknown.

“Super-preliminary observation: It looked like consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart,” Schwartz stated. 

He elaborated that validator operators manually intervened to select a reliable starting point from the last fully validated ledger and resumed publishing validations. While this intervention helped realign the network, Schwartz noted that it was unclear whether this manual action directly resolved the problem or if the network self-healed.

“It looks like, as far as we can tell, only one validator operator manually intervened. It’s still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or the network self-healed,” the CTO updated.

Schwartz reassured users that the incident did not result in any asset losses. He explained that the issue only caused ledgers to be temporarily untrusted for about an hour.

This happened because the servers detected the network’s malfunction and withheld validation during the incident. Ledgers that received the majority of validation were not affected. 

RippleX also reaffirmed that user funds remained secure throughout the event.

“Your funds were always safe!” RippleX posted.

This is not the first time the XRP Ledger has faced technical issues. In November 2024, the network temporarily halted transaction processing for about 10 minutes due to a node crash. 

Earlier, in September 2024, full history nodes on XRPL experienced failures caused by an SQLite database page size limitation, which led to inefficiencies in handling large transaction data.

Despite these setbacks, XRPL has continued to grow. According to Ripple’s recently released Q4 2024 market report, the XRPL saw increased activity across key on-chain metrics.

On-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume reached $1 billion. Furthermore, wallet creation surged to 709,000. New token issuance on the XRPL also increased during this period.

Meanwhile, following the network disruption, XRP’s (XRP) price briefly declined.

However, in the past 24 hours, the price has mostly remained stable, to trade at $2.51 by press time. Yet, in the past seven days, XRP has declined by nearly 20%.