Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse celebrated his 14th anniversary in the XRP ecosystem on social media, thanking developers, validators, businesses, and community members. This statement subsequently raised the long-standing question of how XRP's "birthday" should be calculated.

The controversy points to the starting point of 2012.

Some community members believe that the June anniversary does not accurately correspond to the XRP still in use today. They suggest that the starting point of modern XRP should be December 23, 2012, rather than June, the month the network was originally launched.

This view is based on the fact that the current ledger history cannot be fully traced back to the earliest stages. Due to the lack of early data, transaction records from the first few months of the network cannot be continuously verified.

The earliest verifiable ledger is 32570.

The article mentions that after the Ripple network launched in June 2012, the earliest batch of ledger data could not be fully recovered. The first ledger in the system that could be fully verified was ledger number 32,570.

The missing period covers approximately seven months, from June to December 2012. Therefore, some critics argue that the modern definition of XRP should begin from a continuous and verifiable point in the ledger's history.

Schwartz defends network continuity

In response to this claim, Ripple CTO David Schwartz stated that a change in the accounting system does not mean that the assets themselves have become something else. He used the analogy of a bank changing its accounting system to argue that the continuity of funds is not lost.

He also mentioned that after Ethereum transitioned from PoW to PoS, ETH did not become a different token. Following this logic, even if there are gaps in XRP's early ledger, current XRP and early XRP should still be considered the same asset.

Community disagreements still revolve around the definition

The main point of contention in this discussion lies in how to define "birth time." One side emphasizes the historical point at which the network was first launched, while the other side emphasizes whether the ledger records have a continuous and verifiable history from a certain point in time.

The missing early ledger has become the technical backdrop for this recurring debate. Every anniversary, the XRP community revisits this issue.