Wietse Wind, XRPL developer, creator of the XRPTipBot and XRP Text, announced on Twitter today that the XRPL Testnet provided by Ripple had been reset.
Please note: the XRPL Testnet provided by @Ripple has been reset (this happens every now and then: a fresh testnet ?). I just gave the @XRPLLabs testnet node (wss://testnet.xrpl-labs.com) a reset as well, so it's back in sync with the @Ripple testnet (https://t.co/ML1qFxwgZg)
— Wietse Wind { ???????: ???? } (@WietseWind) August 28, 2019
However, many in the community are speculating that Cobalt may have been the reason behind the reset. Ethan MacBrough, former Research Engineer at Ripple, had created a consensus algorithm called Cobalt. While it wouldn’t be able to facilitate more transactions, it could significantly speed up the time each transaction takes. Overall, if the technology was applied to the XRP Ledger, it would be able to verify transactions in under 2 seconds – remarkably faster than the current 7 seconds it takes. David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO, expanded on Cobalt in this Quora answer.
As the XRP community awaits news of further development on Cobalt, hopes and expectations turned into assumption and speculations.
However, Nik Bougalis, software developer leading the C++ team at Ripple, promptly arrived on the scene to dispute all speculation regarding whether the reset had been done to test code, perhaps related to Cobalt, on the testnet. He tweeted,
No new code; it was just time for a reset. It happens periodically.
— Nik Bougalis (@nbougalis) August 28, 2019
A post on the Ripple server’s Google group reads,
“Please be advised that Ripple has reset their XRP Testnet.
This means that all accounts, balances, and settings in the Testnet have been deleted and all contents of the Testnet’s decentralized exchange have been erased.
The Testnet is now back up and users can get new accounts and new Testnet XRP from the Testnet Faucet.
The production XRP Ledger, or Mainnet, is completely unaffected. This also has no effect on other test networks not run by Ripple.”
Wind responded to the same, stating that he had reset wss://testnet.xrpl-labs.com as well in order to keep it in sync with the Ripple testnet.
