Ripple CTO responds to XRP Ledger block loss controversy: caused by a bug during early development phase

TechFlow, on May 5, David Schwartz, co-founder of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and CTO 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 phase of XRPL. During software development, the team created multiple ledger data streams, one of which had a bug causing approximately 10 days of ledger records to be lost. Although the team performed data recovery, the first 32,569 blocks could not be restored.

At the time, the team expected to quickly reset the ledger and therefore considered the lost historical records unimportant. While they considered cleaning up the ledger to resolve the issue, this would have deleted even more historical records, so they ultimately decided to maintain the status quo. Schwartz emphasized that the loss of these blocks was not due to human intervention but related to the experimental phase during the initial launch of XRPL.