Is XRP Broken? CTO Says ‘Drift’: XRP Ledger Block Production Stalls

The XRP Ledger, one of crypto’s oldest and most trusted networks, broke down on Tuesday, freezing transaction validation for over an hour. The system patched itself and moved on, but concerns over its dependability remain.

This was the second disruption in under three months, igniting concern about deeper issues. Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, shared insights, but questions about the ledger’s future still linger.

As the XRP Price Volume in 24h Price 7d community often says: “It’s always such a bullish sign when the XRP fud increases.”

But is it true this time?

What Caused the XRP Outage?

At ledger height 93,927,173, the XRPL froze, leaving its consensus mechanism working but validators silent. Ripple CTO David Schwartz speculated that servers withheld validations to prevent the spread of bad data.

“We don’t know the details yet, but it’s likely that servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong,” Schwartz posted on X.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz broke the tension with a meme—“Hello, IT, have you tried turning it on and off again?”—before confirming that the XRPL network was back online. Transactions were running normally, though the underlying issue remained unclear.

Schwartz described the problem as a “drift,” where consensus functioned but validations ceased, fragmenting the network. Validator operators stepped in, manually selecting a stable reference point from the last fully validated ledger.

Once a few key validations reappeared, consensus snapped back into place, and the network synced.

Rumors soon swirled on X that multiple validators had stepped in to save the network, but Schwartz later clarified that only one operator had taken action.

The New ‘Preventive’ XRP Clawback Amendment to Prevent Outages

Recently, the Ripple team introduced a new XRP clawback amendment allowing Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to trade directly on the XRP Ledger’s decentralized exchange. This amendment promises better liquidity and expanded DeFi use cases.

These clawback tokens have a built-in recall feature, allowing issuers to retrieve assets from wallets under conditions like fraud or non-compliance.

The recent outages might be why Ripple needs the new clawback feature. If anything happens while XRP is down, they can revert whatever they want on the blockchain with the first 30k blocks missing.

Clawback is mainly for RLUSD (the XRPL stablecoin), which also means it can be used within RLUSD/XRP AMM pools. It can also be enabled for any new tokens launched after the amendment was enacted, but only if the issuer has selected it. Really, this is an institutional feature and one for screw-ups like the outage.

If the clawback feature of RLUSD—a mechanism designed for institutional use in the U.S.—concerns you, then it’s simple: don’t use it. However, many institutions appreciate the added security and compliance that clawback functionality offers, as it aligns with their operational needs and risk management strategies.

What’s Next for XRPL?

It’s important to recognize that XRP isn’t positioning itself as the paragon of decentralization like BTC claims to be.

The emphasis on decentralization only became a focal point after ETH received a regulatory pass from the SEC, which deemed its network “sufficiently decentralized” despite its ICO origins.

The creators of the XRP Ledger previously worked on Bitcoin and identified its limitations: it’s slow, costly, and energy-intensive. These shortcomings make BTC impractical for widespread use, according to them, but also open up centralized assets like XRPL to outages.

So, what comes out on top? We’ll see, but glitches and outages aren’t features that should make any XRP fan happy.

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