Has the XRP Ledger ever halted, forked or lost funds since 2012, and what happened?

The full answer

XRPL.org’s home page, checked September 29, 2026, advertises “14 Years+” of “Continuous uptime.”[1] The record below tests that line against dated reports. It covers only incidents found in XRPL.org’s own posts or in dated news reporting, searched September 29, 2026.

What happened to the earliest ledgers?

They are missing. Protos reported on July 25, 2025 that “operators of the Ripple network lost headers for 32,569 ledgers,” quoting Ripple founder Joel Katz that “a bug that caused ledger headers not to be properly saved” affected every server running at the time. “The first ledger with fully verifiable headers is 32,570 on January 1, 2013.” Protos added that the public “cannot reconstruct the data within 534 transactions,” so users “must trust the statements of people who were operating the Ripple network in 2012.”[2]

When has the ledger stopped?

Two pauses appear in the record:

• November 25, 2024, about 10 minutes. A malicious transaction exploited a bug from a January 2024 code change and crashed servers, pausing new transactions for “approximately 10 minutes.” XRPL.org’s report says “There was no loss of funds.” The fix shipped in rippled 2.3.0 the same day.[3]
• February 4, 2025, about an hour. Decrypt reported the ledger “halted block production for about an hour on Tuesday before spontaneously recovering,” at ledger height 93,927,173. Ripple CTO David Schwartz, as Decrypt identified him, said “validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart,” and Decrypt wrote that he “was quick to clarify no assets were at risk.”[4]

In our reading. Going by XRPL.org’s consensus protections page, both pauses fit how the ledger is built to fail, though neither incident report says a validator threshold was crossed. XRPL.org says that “If more than about 20% of validators are unreachable or not behaving properly, the network fails to reach a consensus.”[5] The trade is deliberate: the network stops rather than confirm transactions a large share of validators have not agreed on. Whether a network that a small set of trusted validators can stall is sound is argued on the validator centralization critique. How consensus works in normal operation is on consensus without mining.

A third event came close. On the evening of July 30, 2026, “a flood of manifest messages” caused mass disconnects between servers. XRPL.org says “The underlying XRPL ledger never halted or forked” and “No loss of funds, private key compromise, or ledger data-integrity issue occurred.” A fix shipped in version 3.2.1 on July 31.[6]

Has the ledger ever forked?

No XRPL.org report or news coverage as of September 29, 2026 describes a split into two competing ledgers. The July 2026 report states directly that the ledger “never halted or forked.”[6] Researchers at Common Prefix found two bugs in how validators handle transaction sets; XRPL.org said exploiting them “required one of the ~35 UNL validators to have been compromised,” and they were fixed in rippled 3.0.0 on December 9, 2025.[7]

Has anyone lost funds?

No public report describes a loss of user funds caused by a ledger fault. Two incidents came nearest.

The first was the AMM launch. AMM pools went live on March 22, 2024, and four days later XRPL.org said “a community member identified a discrepancy in a few AMM pools which indicated transactions were not executing as intended.” It advised: “it’s best for users to redeem LP tokens and not deposit new funds into AMM pools.”[8] Version 2.1.1 followed on March 27 to fix “a critical bug in the integration of AMMs with the payment engine.”[9] No public figure for losses to pool providers has been given. How AMM pools work is covered on how XRPL AMMs work.

The second was outside the ledger. On April 21, 2025, attackers published backdoored versions of xrpl.js, a code library developers use to build wallets and apps. XRPL.org said it “does not affect the XRP Ledger network or codebase,” and on April 28, 2025 that “no downstream effects have been reported.” Anyone who had installed those versions was told to assume their wallets were compromised and move to new keys.[10]

Which bugs were caught before they went live?

Three disclosures describe flaws found while a feature was still in development or being voted on:

• Permission Delegation, September 2025: a bug that “could have been maliciously used to drain an account’s XRP balance.” XRPL.org: “The feature was not enabled on mainnet.”[11]
• Batch, February 2026: a flaw that let an attacker run transactions for other accounts. It “had not been activated on mainnet; no funds were at risk.”[12]
• Sponsored Fees and Reserves, September 2026: a reserve-accounting flaw found during Devnet testing. “The Sponsor amendment has not been activated on Mainnet. No funds were at risk.”[13]

The most recent entry is open.

On September 25, 2026, XRPL.org released version 3.4.1 as “an emergency release to fix security-sensitive issues in the XRPL protocol,” withholding the source code until “a retrospective on a future date.” It adds a fix amendment, fixBatchV1_2, that XRPL.org expected to be enabled on October 9, 2026; if it is, servers that do not upgrade “will become amendment blocked.”[14] The release’s changelog names a fix to reject Batch inner transactions with the wrong wrapper and “integer-arithmetic hardening”; XRPL.org had published no fuller account of the fixes by September 29, 2026.[14]

What does this record mean for the “running since 2012” claim?

Protos reported on July 25, 2025 that the ledger’s 2012 history cannot be publicly verified because the headers for the first 32,569 ledgers were lost, so any claim that its chain of balances runs back to 2012 rests on trusting the statements of the 2012 operators.[2] It has not run without interruption: XRPL.org’s own reports record a pause in November 2024, and Decrypt reported another in February 2025.[3][4] According to a July 2025 Protos report quoting Ripple founder Joel Katz, operators lost the headers for the first 32,569 ledgers of 2012 because of a bug shared by all servers at the time, so the first ledger with fully verifiable headers is 32,570 on January 1, 2013.[2] How the ledger is usually introduced is on what the XRP Ledger is.