The XRP LEDGER (XRPL) was briefly unavailable early Wednesday, because a consensual mechanism design led to a temporary stop in network operations.
The incident started when the network consensus process seemed to work, but the validations were not published, which made the network books separate. “
In the large XRP book, the consensus between validators is crucial to update the big book with new transactions. If the validators cannot agree on the transactions to be included in the version of the following big book, the network cannot go ahead.
A “drift” in this context means that if the consensus protocol was technically under execution, the validations (or the confirmations of the transactions of transactions) were not published.
At least one validator operator intervened manually to reset the network consensus to a state of major book previously validated, although the network seems to have rectified the problem independently, said CTO Ripple David Schwarz in a post X after the incident .
“It is likely that the servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew that something was wrong,” said Schwarz. “And I wanted to make sure that no server accepted a large book as entirely validated when it could not be sure that the network will keep and end up agreeing on this great book.
“A possible failure mode for XRPL is if all the validators think that something is wrong with the network, all refuse to send validations, then there is no chatter to leave the REGERGER network. This is the failure of the “silent network”, “added Schwarz.
No assets were at risk during stop times, with XRP prices largely in accordance with the broader movements of Bitcoin and Altcoin.
