Notably, the trade price of $XRP Cryptocurrency has been struggling badly for the last couple of days, as the XRPL network was offline for an hour.
XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a popular Proof-of-stake (PoS) crypto network. Ripple, a San Francisco headquartered blockchain firm, is responsible for the management of development around this blockchain network. $XRP is the native coin of this network & has been the core product for Ripple’s cross-border payment services. $XRP is open to use for any company in payment service, providing no permission from Ripple.
The current trade price of $XRP coin is $2.41 & this price level is 21% down over the last 7 days of the period. Notably, the price of this Cryptocurrency has been struggling for the last two days, as we can see in the price graph.
This downturn in the trade price of this Cryptocurrency is fully attributed to the recent outage faced by the XRPL network. This network was offline for nearly 64 minutes, on 5 Feb. Later, the network recovered, but RippleX, a developer-focused platform for integrating Ripple payment with XRPL, failed to find the exact reason for identifying the issue.
In response to this network outage incident, Ripple CTO David Schwartz said that the exact cause of the issue was unknown, but initial investigations suggest that while consensus was functioning, validations were not being published, causing the network to become unaligned. Furthermore, Schwartz added that the preliminary findings of this incident may change with further analysis.
Earlier in Nov 2024, the XRPL network faced a partial outage. In that 10-minute outage, several nodes across this Cryptocurrency network crashed, but the issue was fixed after the affected nodes restarted.
These network outage issues for this top Cryptocurrency network within 3 months raised concerns about the network’s stability and injected a high level of negative confidence among the $XRP coin investors.
Load on XRPL increasing?
Some crypto enthusiasts claimed that network outage issues with the XRPL network are proof that the load on this network is rapidly increasing and the network’s existing potential is not able to handle this load.
The Automated Market Maker (AMM) feature, introduced in the XRPL DEX ecosystem in March, saw a massive surge in crypto trade volume, jumping from $31.23 million in Q3 to $774.15 million in Q4 in 2024. As per latest reports, the trade volume increased XRPL DEX from $63.4 million to $1 billion.
Now it will be interesting to see how the RippleX & XRP community devs will handle this situation, whether they will go for a new technical level of development or bring alternative approaches to fight against network outage challenges.
Here, we can compare this situation with the Proof-of-stake (PoS) network Solana, which is a highly scalable blockchain in this whole crypto space. Despite high scalability potential, the network faces outages. In 2023, the Solana community devs spent the majority of the time fighting against network outage issues and made Solana a better network to handle big on-chain trading activities.
The last time the Solana network was down was on February 6, 2024; since then, the network has been active with no downtime, the longest continuous uptime in the history of the network.
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