Ripple's token, XRP, grew by 4,000% in 2017. The growth is so impressive that people are claiming that XRP is even better than bitcoin. If someone had invested $1.00 in ripple at the start of 2017 then now he would enjoy a return of $4,000 on the initial investment. Even the best stock markets do not offer such explosive returns.
It is understandable that people want to gain on their returns and many have invested thousands on the digital token. Ripple is one of the most centralized of the digital tokens. It plans on helping the banks in transforming their transaction systems for the better. However, Ripple’s infrastructure is not strong enough to handle the increase in traffic which it is enjoying the last couple of months. On December 29th, a number of users temporarily lost their XRP coins.
They eventually got their tokens back, and it turns out that the tokens had vanished into thin air for some time. Users reported that they were unable to track their tokens and the situation seemed like a breach of the Ripple network.
Ripple’s server was down
Upon further investigation, it was determined that the Ripple's server, s2.ripple.com, was down. When the users tried to carry out transactions, it was simply lost in the downed server. The transaction was shown as a success to the user, but there was no attached transaction ID.
Whoever was responsible for managing the servers, simply did not provide a rerouting protocol. Because of this, the transactions were unable to reroute themselves to the other working servers or return an error message.
Risks of a deregulated market
One can understand that there can be such risks in a deregulated market. However, when Ripple's network is dealing with billions of dollars on a daily basis, it is their duty to ensure that their networks are bug-free. Without such fail-safes put in place, a downed server may give a hacker the opportunity needed to attack the network.