Ripple’s David Schwartz Weighs in on Stellar (XLM) Going Down For an Hour, XRPL Prone to Same Halt Risk

Stellar (XLM), which is the ninth largest cryptocurrency, stopped confirming transactions for two hours on May 15. The cause, it appears, was a mass offlining of Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) nodes, which the majority of the network trusts.

The platform couldn’t reach consensus meaning no transactions were validated, because, one Redditor said “most validators on the network, if not all of them, trust SDF nodes. So that means that SDF validators are needed for the network to reach consensus.”

Ripple’s also CTO David Schwartz weighed in on the issue.

It may pain me to say it, but this is an excellent post from @StellarOrg on the 67 minute halt that their network suffered yesterday.https://t.co/1o9EiRY9iU

— David Schwartz (@JoelKatz) May 16, 2019

He continued by saying:

“One bit of good news to come out of this is that it demonstrates, at least in this one example, that if the validator topology of a live network does break, the network can fail safely and humans can negotiate a topology change to resume safely in a reasonable time.”

XLM saw significant volatility around the time of the outage, nonetheless recovering to surge 23% in the 24 hours to press time. It later fell back mostly due to Bitcoin’ price dragging down the momentum.

The halt wasn’t because Stellar’s Consensus Protocol failed — in fact, it worked as intended. For a system like Stellar, a temporary halt is preferable to the permanent confusion of a fork. But yesterday shows that Stellar needs better tooling around uptime. The blockchain even needs better community standards around maintenance timings, quorum set building, and validator configuration. Overall, the outage was a stress test — one that Stellar passed in terms of user safety but failed in terms of uptime.

Earlier, Stellar experienced an accidental hard fork in December 2014, a development which caused panic in the market. XLM, which is based on Ripple’s Consensus protocol, has been widely questioned about its integrity.