XRP Price Drops 8% After Network Downtime – What Happened?

The price of Ripple has taken a sharp hit, dropping more than 8% and sliding back to $2.50. The plunge follows an unexpected halt in XRP Ledger (XRPL) operations, which disrupted blockchain production for nearly an hour.

While Ripple CTO David Schwartz has assured the community that the network has recovered, the incident has raised concerns among investors, leading to a sharp decline in trading volumes.

XRP Ledger Faces Temporary Halt

On Tuesday, the XRP Ledger experienced an unusual downtime that lasted about an hour, causing the blockchain’s activity to freeze at ledger height 93,927,173. Although the network quickly resumed operations without any loss of transactions or assets, the temporary pause was enough to spark panic selling, driving XRP’s price down to its crucial support at $2.50.

David Schwartz acknowledged the issue, stating that while the consensus mechanism was operational, the validations were not being published, causing a drift in network synchronization. To restore normal operations, validator operators manually intervened by selecting a stable starting point to resume block production.

Schwartz also pointed to the Unique Node List (UNL) as a crucial element in XRPL’s recovery. Community members, including Edo Farina of XRP Healthcare, defended XRPL’s reliability, emphasizing that in its 12-year history, the ledger has maintained a remarkable 99.999% uptime. Farina clarified that the halt was not due to network congestion but rather an issue within the consensus mechanism.

Market Reaction and Institutional Interest in Ripple

The XRP price dip is going hand in hand with the 41% decrease in the number of everyday trades being executed, which is now at $13.11 billion. At the same time, XRP futures open interest dropped by 12.2% to $3.65 billion, with Coinglass reporting $21 million worth. The number of liquidations in the last 24 hours has reached $21 million.

Coinshares for instance had Goldman XRG, the single largest holders of XRP, and issued $105 million worth of year-to-day (YTD) inflows, making it the second best performing altcoin which is quite shocking since they have only started streaming XRP since the start of 2025. Just last week, XRP was able to bring in another $15 million, showing the trust investors have with them. Also, the asset managers Grayscale and Canada’s Purpose Investments continue to work on ETF proposals for spot XRP which further adds to the long-term bullishness around the token.

It would also seem that while XRP is fighting the bearish sentiment, the other parts of the world are enjoying this dip through institutional investments. Along with this, the active efforts to improve the network leads me to believe that the strong bearish sentiment is on a temporary trend rather than a permanent one.