The post Ripple’s lost 32,569 ledgers continues to feed conspiracy theories appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Ripple’s earliest ledger data from its June 2012 launch is irretrievably incomplete due to a server bug that erased the headers for the first 32,569 ledgers. The significant gap in the XRP Ledger’s transaction history has the community asking where the pre-mined 100 billion XRP went. Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz addressed the incident in a 2012 Bitcoin forum post, stating, “Unfortunately, due to a server bug, some history was lost. You can’t trace all the way back to the genesis ledger. You can trace back to ledger 32,570.”  However, questions continue to arise from time to time, especially in the wake of recent XRP sales by Ripple’s co-founder, Chris Larsen.  Are Ripple’s early ledgers recoverable?  Transactional content from the early ledgers still exists. Still, missing headers and metadata that link each ledger to the one before it break the cryptographic chain that verifies the integrity of blockchain records.  Ripple Forum discussion of David Schwartz’s message on the deleted ledgers. Source: Forum.ripple.com According to a discussion among Ripple devs seen on the forum, developers and independent validators cannot fully reconstruct or authenticate the earliest 534 transactions on the XRP Ledger without those headers. XRP, like other blockchain systems, uses the hash of each preceding ledger to validate the next. The absence of those foundational links means that all current users of the XRP Ledger must accept the existing records on faith, trusting the individuals who operated the network during its first seven months. Do the lost ledgers matter? The period from June to December 2012 contains the most significant activity in XRP’s history, the pre-mining and initial distribution of all XRP coins. Unlike Bitcoin, which issues coins through mining, XRP’s 100 billion tokens were pre-mined by Ripple’s founders and distributed manually.  Of those, 80% were allocated to Ripple companies to fund…

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Filed under: News - @ July 25, 2025 6:36 pm