🧐 XRP’S MISSING HISTORY Ripple launched the $XRP Ledger in June 2012 and lost all data by New Year's Eve due to a bug that caused ledger headers not to be saved. All servers running at the time had the same bug, according to founder @JoelKatz. Here's what happened... 🧵

The first verifiable ledger is 32,570 on January 1, 2013, which founders relabeled as the "Genesis ledger." Without the missing headers, the public cannot reconstruct 534 transactions from those early ledgers, including the most important ones in XRP's history.

Those lost transactions include the $XRP pre-mine: founders created 100 billion coins by fiat, allocated 80% to Ripple companies and kept 20% for themselves. All XRP users today must trust statements from people who operated the network in 2012 about these massive allocations.

Ripple engineers attempted recovery in 2013 using backups but couldn't reassemble the ledgers to match cryptographic proofs. The missing data problem resurfaced this year when the XRP Ledger automatically halted for 64 minutes on February 5, 2025 due to validator disagreement.

Currently, just 33 validators on the XRPL Foundation's Unique Node List rule the XRP Ledger, compared to Bitcoin's 23,000+ internet-connected full nodes. More ⤵️