XRP Hemorrhages Following Ledger Downtime

Crypto markets are feeling the pressure, but one asset is particularly struggling: XRP.

As the 4th cryptocurrency by market cap, XRP has become the top decliner among the top 10 assets, dropping 3.16% in the past 24 hours and 22.10% over the last week, with its price currently sitting at $2.42, according to CoinMarketCap.

Open interest in XRP has also hit a monthly low, falling to $3.52 billion, down significantly from its all-time high of $7.62 billion on 17 January, as reported by CoinGlass.

Open interest, which reflects the total value of unsettled futures contracts, signals a shift in market sentiment.

XRP Ledger Outage Resolved But Community Sceptical

The XRP Ledger, used for XRP-powered applications and emerging meme coins, experienced a technical issue on Tuesday, causing a 64-minute disruption.

The outage sparked concerns among users and led to a brief dip in XRP's price, reflecting a shift in market sentiment.

Ripple's Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, explained that the disruption was caused by a "network drift"—a failure in block production, even as the consensus process continued.

This glitch temporarily halted transactions, though Schwartz noted that only one validator appeared to intervene manually, with uncertainty around whether the issue was resolved by this action or if the network “self-healed” through the agreement of validators on the next block.

During the outage, wallet services like Xaman Wallet experienced transaction failures.

However, Schwartz reassured users that no assets were lost.

Despite this, XRP's price dropped by 6% during US trading hours on 4 February, slipping below key moving averages and facing broader bearish sentiment, worsened by the weak crypto market at the time.

Some analysts, like MartyParty, raised concerns about XRP’s throughput, noting its limit of 20 transactions per second (tps).

This low capacity could hinder the network's scalability, potentially affecting its ability to compete with other blockchain solutions.

While the incident did not result in asset loss, addressing scalability issues will be crucial for XRP to maintain investor confidence and long-term viability.