The XRP Ledger (XRPL) community has long wondered what happened to the first 32,569 ledger entries. With permanent record-keeping only starting at ledger 32,570, those early blocks have been missing from public view for years — and critics have not let that go unnoticed.
For some, the missing data has fueled claims that Ripple, a crypto company which leverages XRP in its operations, or the XRPL development team, may have deliberately wiped early transactions, possibly to hide activity or gain an advantage. It is often cited in arguments that XRP is not truly decentralized and that Ripple has too much control over the network.
Now, Ripple CTO and XRPL co-creator David Schwartz has stepped in to clear things up. According to Schwartz, the missing ledgers date back to XRPL’s earliest development and testing days.
Multiple ledger streams were being created as the software was taking shape, and a bug in one of those streams caused about 10 days’ worth of ledgers to be lost. Recovery efforts brought back everything except those first 32,569 blocks.
We created many ledger streams in the process of testing and developing the software. In one of many streams, a software bug caused some ledgers (about ten days) to be lost. All but the first 32k or so were recovered. We expected the next ledger reset to make the issue…
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) May 5, 2025
At the time, the team expected to reset the ledger again soon, which would have made the lost history irrelevant. But that reset never happened. They thought about wiping the ledger to clean things up, but that would have deleted even more history, so they left it as is.
It looks like the mystery of the missing blocks is finally solved. The loss was not intentional, and it did not involve any kind of manipulation. It was a one-time thing, related to the experimental stage of XRPL’s launch.
