The Ledger XRP (XRPL) was not briefly available early Wednesday, since a consensus mechanism design led to a temporary stop in network operations.
The incident began when the network consensus process seemed to work, but they were not publishing validations, which caused the network accounting books to “separate”.
In the major book XRP, the consensus among the validators is crucial to update the main book with new transactions. If the validators cannot agree which transactions to include in the next version of the biggest book, the network cannot advance.
A “drift” in this context means that, although the consensus protocol was technically executing, validations were not being published (or confirmations of transaction sets).
At least one validator operator intervened manually to restore the consensus of the network to a previously validated accounting state, although the network seemed to have rectified the problem independently, said Ripple David Schwarz’s CTO in an X position after the incident.
“It is likely that the servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong,” said Schwarz. “And I wanted to make sure that no server accepted a major book as fully validated when it could not be sure that the network would keep and eventually agree on that major book.
“A possible way of failure for XRPL is whether all validators think that something is wrong with the network, everyone refuses to send any validation, and then there is no talk to allow the network to be again. This is the ‘silent network’ failure, “Schwarz added.
There are no risk assets during inactivity time, with XRP prices largely in line with broader Bitcoin and Altcoin movements.
