The Ripple network faced severe disruptions earlier this week as a surge in airdrop-related activity overwhelmed critical infrastructure, knocking several crypto wallets and services offline. The incident exposed vulnerabilities in the XRP Ledger (XRPL) ecosystem, particularly around node capacity and scalability under unexpected load.
At the heart of the issue were two primary public nodes — S1 and S2 — maintained directly by Ripple Labs. These nodes fell out of sync for over five hours due to an influx of so-called “trash” data, primarily stemming from trustline requests and token airdrops. The disruption was first highlighted by crypto analyst @WKahneman in a widely shared Twitter thread, which pointed to systemic strain caused by non-core users leveraging XRPL for speculative token distributions.
“Basically, all the trash trustline/airdrops are overwhelming the XRPL right now as they largely funnel through 2 nodes. Some trustline optimization and increased infrastructure are needed. All these airdrops depend on a network they are not invested in.”
This traffic spike didn’t just affect isolated services — it cascaded across the broader XRPL ecosystem. Secondary nodes like XRPLCluster also experienced performance degradation, while smaller exchanges reported delayed transaction processing times. Bitrue, a mid-tier exchange, acknowledged issues with slow transaction confirmations on its XRPL node, warning users that deposits and withdrawals could be impacted.
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Why Airdrop Activity Brought XRPL to Its Knees
Despite Ripple’s long-standing claims that the XRP Ledger can handle up to 1,500 transactions per second, this incident revealed a different bottleneck: not raw transaction speed, but network resource management under distributed usage patterns.
The core issue wasn’t transaction volume alone — it was the sudden spike in simultaneous user interactions, particularly trustline setups. On XRPL, a trustline is a mechanism that allows users to hold and transact non-XRP tokens (such as IOUs or utility tokens) issued on the ledger. When projects launch new tokens and distribute them via airdrops, they require recipients to establish trustlines to receive the assets.
This process generates significant metadata and query load on public nodes, especially when thousands of users activate trustlines at once. Since most developers and apps rely on Ripple-maintained nodes like S1 and S2 for free access to ledger data, these entry points became single points of failure.
XRPL’s architecture assumes a balanced distribution of query load, but in practice, many third-party apps and wallets route their traffic through these centralized public gateways. As one engineer noted, S1 and S2 were never intended for production-level usage — yet they’ve become de facto infrastructure for much of the ecosystem.
Full History Nodes Reboot Amid Code Bug
Compounding the crisis, another issue emerged shortly after: a bug in the XRPL source code caused all 10 Full History nodes — responsible for storing and serving the complete transaction history of the ledger — to crash and reboot simultaneously.
XRPL Labs confirmed the incident, explaining:
“All 10 XRP Ledger Full History nodes (maintained by different operators at different geographical locations) restarted themselves... We will now have to wait for the Full History nodes to start, sync up with the network and start replying to requests again. This will take approximately 20 minutes.”
The fact that geographically dispersed nodes all failed at once suggests a flaw in the underlying software rather than isolated hardware failure. According to reports, XRPL Labs had flagged these issues with RippleX engineers over a month prior, indicating known technical debt within the system.
This dual-layer failure — overloaded public nodes and unstable full history infrastructure — created a perfect storm that disrupted user experience across wallets, exchanges, and analytics platforms.
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FAQ: Understanding the XRPL Outage
Q: What caused the Ripple network slowdown?
A: A surge in trustline creation from token airdrops overwhelmed key public nodes (S1 and S2), leading to synchronization failures and degraded performance across dependent services.
Q: Are XRP transactions still secure?
A: Yes. The consensus mechanism remained intact, and no funds were lost. However, transaction confirmation delays occurred due to node congestion and fee escalation bugs.
Q: Why do so many apps rely on just two Ripple-maintained nodes?
A: Many developers use S1 and S2 because they’re free, well-documented, and easy to integrate. However, they were designed for testing, not production-scale traffic.
Q: Was this a security breach or hack?
A: No. The issue stemmed from architectural limitations and software bugs, not malicious attacks or exploits.
Q: Can this happen again?
A: Without infrastructure upgrades and better load distribution, similar incidents are likely — especially during future airdrop campaigns or NFT launches on XRPL.
Q: How can developers avoid this problem?
A: By running their own validator nodes or using commercial node providers, developers can reduce reliance on public gateways and improve resilience.
Toward a More Resilient XRPL Ecosystem
While temporary patches restored functionality — such as XUMM Wallet adjusting fee logic to bypass congested queues — experts agree that long-term stability requires deeper changes.
XRPL Labs emphasized the need for increased node capacity and improved code optimization:
“If we increase the capacity (the amount of simultaneous end users who can be served responses to their queries… the overall user experience will increase & a failing node can be instantly replaced by a spare one.”
In other words, redundancy and scalability must be built into the infrastructure layer. This includes incentivizing independent node operators, decentralizing query access, and optimizing how metadata-heavy operations like trustlines are processed.
Moreover, the incident highlights a growing tension between Ripple’s vision of XRPL as a scalable enterprise-grade ledger and its reality as an open platform used heavily by speculative crypto projects. Many of these projects benefit from XRPL’s low fees and fast settlement but contribute little to network maintenance or development funding.
Final Thoughts: Technical Debt Meets Real-World Usage
As WietseWind, a prominent XRPL developer, put it:
“A ledger that can’t handle 20 transactions per second without having nodes fall over and fee escalation bugs popping up needs fixing, agree?”
The outage underscores a critical truth: theoretical throughput numbers mean little if real-world usage exposes fragility in supporting infrastructure. For XRPL to mature into a truly robust decentralized network, it must address not only performance but also ecosystem incentives, node diversity, and long-term sustainability.
Until then, events like this serve as stress tests — revealing both progress made and how far the network still has to go.
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