Ripple CTO Responds to XRP Ledger Missing Block Controversy: Caused by a Bug in Early Development Stage

According to TechFlow, on May 5, David Schwartz, co-founder of the $XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, responded on Twitter regarding the loss of the early 32,569 ledger records.

Schwartz stated that the lost ledger records date back to the earliest development and testing phases of the XRPL. During software development, the team created multiple ledger data streams, and one of these streams had a bug that resulted in about 10 days of ledger records being lost. Although the team performed data recovery, the first 32,569 blocks remain unrecoverable.

At the time, the team expected to reset the ledger quickly and thus considered the lost historical records unimportant. While they considered resolving the issue by cleaning the ledger, this would have deleted more historical records, so the decision was ultimately made to maintain the status quo. Schwartz emphasized that the loss of these blocks was not due to human operation but related to the experimental phase during the early launch of the XRPL.