Ripple founders and early insiders launched the XRP Ledger in June 2012 and misplaced all of its information by New 12 months’s Eve.
In 2012, Ripple used the time period ledger as an alternative of block to explain a bundle of transactions with a cryptographically hashed header. Within the lingo of that point interval, to maneuver ripples (XRP cash) throughout the Ripple community, validators would verify a ledger’s header utilizing the Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) and obtain consensus for the validity of that bundle of transactions by the Ripple Consensus Protocol.
Sadly, operators of the Ripple community misplaced headers for 32,569 ledgers, apparently due to “a bug that caused ledger headers not to be properly saved. All the servers running at the time had the same bug,” in accordance with Ripple Founder Joel Katz.
Early insiders determined to name this New 12 months’s Eve erasure a mishap to each admit their failure and downplay its significance.
The primary ledger with absolutely verifiable headers is 32,570 on January 1, 2013. Founders relabeled it the Genesis ledger.
With out the daisy chain of headers linking every ledger to the earlier ledger, the general public can not reconstruct the information inside 534 transactions. Though the cloaked transactions are immutable, no developer can restore their precise content material.
My favourite reality about $XRP is that the whole first week is lacking from the ledger historical past and that is thought-about utterly regular
So 32569 ledgers (learn: blocks) have been misplaced without end and there is a whole bunch of Billion of {Dollars} of provide which u cannot decide origin https://t.co/7TsGCF5nFp pic.twitter.com/NdWyiCSOBK
— Wazz (@WazzCrypto) July 24, 2025
Like different blockchains, XRP’s consensus protocol depends on the hash of every prior ledger to validate subsequent ledgers.
Consequently, all customers of the XRP Ledger at present should belief the statements of people that have been working the Ripple community in 2012. An important transactions from these seven months, in fact, are the biggest within the community’s historical past: the XRP pre-mine.
At inception in 2012, the founders of XRP pre-mined 100 billion cash by fiat, not by mining. They allotted 80% to Ripple firms that may keep on improvement and saved 20% for themselves.
Transactions from these early ledgers periodically resurface, together with a transaction by founder Chris Larsen as not too long ago as final week that originated from 2012.
No restoration of 32,569 misplaced XRP ledgers
Ledger 32,570 is the earliest level from which XRP’s transaction historical past is absolutely intact, and that snapshot contains account balances however not the contents and histories of these balances.
Ripple engineers made some makes an attempt at restoration in 2013 utilizing backups however have been unable to reassemble the ledgers in exact match to the cryptographic proofs in ledgers after 32,569.
Curiously, the issue of lacking 2012 information resurfaced this yr after an automated halt of the XRP Ledger on February 5, 2025. The community stopped processing transactions for 64 minutes at ledger 93,927,173. Validator disagreement exceeding 20% of ledger states triggered a double-spending prevention mechanism.
As of now, 33 validators on the XRPL Basis’s urged Distinctive Node Listing rule the XRP Ledger. For comparability, the Bitcoin community has over 23,000 internet-connected full nodes.
Some observers defended the misplaced 2012 XRP ledger information, blaming founders of different blockchains for making related errors to Ripple. Schwartz as soon as admitted that the group thought-about wiping and resetting the ledger in 2013 fully but in the end declined.
