How XRP lost its first 32,569 ledgers — and why it matters

Ripple founders and early insiders launched the XRP Ledger in June 2012 and lost all of its data by New Year’s Eve.

In 2012, Ripple used the term ledger instead of block to describe a bundle of transactions with a cryptographically hashed header. In the lingo of that time period, to move ripples (XRP coins) across the Ripple network, validators would check a ledger’s header using the Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) and achieve consensus for the validity of that bundle of transactions through the Ripple Consensus Protocol.

Unfortunately, operators of the Ripple network lost headers for 32,569 ledgers, apparently because of “a bug that caused ledger headers not to be properly saved. All the servers running at the time had the same bug,” according to Ripple Founder Joel Katz.

Early insiders decided to call this New Year’s Eve erasure a mishap to both admit their failure and downplay its importance.

The first ledger with fully verifiable headers is 32,570 on January 1, 2013. Founders relabeled it the Genesis ledger.

Without the daisy chain of headers linking each ledger to the previous ledger, the public cannot reconstruct the data within 534 transactions. Although the cloaked transactions are immutable, no developer can restore their actual content.

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Like other blockchains, XRP’s consensus protocol relies on the hash of each prior ledger to validate subsequent ledgers.

As a result, all users of the XRP Ledger today must trust the statements of people who were operating the Ripple network in 2012. The most important transactions from those seven months, of course, are the largest in the network’s history: the XRP pre-mine.

At inception in 2012, the founders of XRP pre-mined 100 billion coins by fiat, not by mining. They allocated 80% to Ripple companies that would carry on development and kept 20% for themselves.

Transactions from those early ledgers periodically resurface, including a transaction by founder Chris Larsen as recently as last week that originated from 2012.

No recovery of 32,569 lost XRP ledgers

Ledger 32,570 is the earliest point from which XRP’s transaction history is fully intact, and that snapshot includes account balances but not the contents and histories of those balances.

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Ripple engineers made some attempts at recovery in 2013 using backups but were unable to reassemble the ledgers in precise match to the cryptographic proofs in ledgers after 32,569.

Interestingly, the problem of missing 2012 data resurfaced this year after an automatic halt of the XRP Ledger on February 5, 2025. The network 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 Foundation’s suggested Unique Node List rule the XRP Ledger. For comparison, the Bitcoin network has over 23,000 internet-connected full nodes.

Some observers defended the lost 2012 XRP ledger data, blaming founders of other blockchains for making similar mistakes to Ripple. Schwartz once admitted that the team considered wiping and resetting the ledger in 2013 entirely yet ultimately declined.