What Else Is In Ledger 32,570

The snapshot holds 53 trustlines. Fifty-two of them are the currencies you would expect from a payment network in 2013 — dollars, bitcoin, a few Canadian dollars, one euro, one yen. The fifty-third is a currency code that appears nowhere else in the ledger, before or since:

One account issued exactly one unit of MEA to another. The issuer’s side carries a balance of −1 against a limit of 0; the holder’s side carries +1 against a limit of 1. It is the smallest possible position: one unit, one holder, one trustline. Our own token records agree — total supply 1, holders 1.

Every object in the ledger carries a PreviousTxnLgrSeq— the index of the ledger in which it was last written. For this trustline it reads the same number in the 2013 snapshot and in validated state today:

The obvious explanation would be abandonment — two dead wallets, a forgotten test. That is not what happened. The issuer went on to sign 312 transactions between May 2013 and June 2023; the holder signed 582 between February 2013 and June 2023, including 294 offers. They have transacted with each other ten times. Both accounts are alive today. They stayed active for a decade and never once touched this line.

The same sweep turns up an absence that is easy to miss because there is nothing to see. Across all 136 accounts in the snapshot:

Not one account set a Domain, an EmailHash, a MessageKey, a RegularKey or a TransferRate. Every single one carries Flags: 0 — no RequireDestTag, no DisallowXRP, no RequireAuth. The mechanisms existed and the founding cohort used none of them.

That is worth stating plainly because it explains a difficulty that runs through all of this work. The XRP Ledger has a built-in way to prove who owns an address, and at the moment its records begin, nobody had used it. Which is why naming the accounts depends on forum posts, domain files published a decade later, and chain analysis — there was never an on-chain alternative to fall back on.

Eight accounts in the snapshot were last written to before ledger 30 — and then never again in the 32,540 ledgers that followed, nor in the thirteen years after that.

Ledger 7 is about as close to the beginning as any surviving evidence reaches. Whatever these accounts were for, their entire on-chain life happened in the first few minutes of the network and left a balance that has sat still ever since.

Sequence numbers survive the loss: an account’s sequence at ledger 32,570 is one more than the number of transactions it had sent, so the snapshot preserves an exact activity count for a week nobody can read.

The counterweight: 100 of the 136 accounts have balances that are exact whole XRP with no drops missing, and every one of them has Sequence: 1. Three quarters of the founding ledger was funded and then sat perfectly still while a handful of accounts did all the work.

The XRP Ledger has a field designed to carry arbitrary human text: the Memo. If any of the founding accounts ever attached a note to a transaction, it would be there. So we read every memo on every transaction sent by all 136 accounts, across their entire histories to the present day.

Every single one is identical:

That is a wallet stamping its own name on transactions it signs — software, not a person. Across thirteen years there is not one human-written memo in the entire founding set. Put beside the zero Domains and zero flags above, the picture is consistent: the founding cohort left no deliberate text anywhere on the ledger. Anyone hunting for an encoded message is hunting in a field that was never used.

Direct payments between founding accounts give 94 edges once the seven hub accounts are removed. Most are one-off. A few go both ways, which is more interesting — two accounts paying each other repeatedly is harder to explain as coincidence than a single transfer:

But the strongest structure in the snapshot is not a pair. Four accounts hold exactly 370 XRP— an odd, unround amount that appears nowhere else — and they were funded within seven ledgers of one another:

The account last written at ledger 8 — second-oldest object in the snapshot — is rUnFEsHjxqTswbivzL2DNHBb34rhAgZZZK. It attracts identity speculation because of how it reads, which we test separately and at length. What matters here is different: it is a useful worked example of how far the chain will actually carry you once you start pulling on one account.

Exactly 10,000 XRP with not one drop spent, no trustlines at the horizon, then an active decade — 118 payments, 95 offers created, 25 trustlines opened — taking in 219,856 XRP and sending out 1,250. An early hands-on user, in other words, not a founder wallet: founder accounts received round billions and sat still.

The rest is negative and worth stating precisely, because absence is a result. Chris Larsen’s account appears nowhere in those 266 transactions, in either direction. Nor does David Schwartz’s— across 266 and 1,400 transactions respectively there is no contact at all, and the ten counterparties they share are mass distributors, gateways, and rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrBZbvji, the placeholder that appears in pathfinding rather than any real party.

What the account does have is an ordinary relationship with rM1oqKtfh1zgjdAgbFmaRm3btfGBX25xVo— 79 interactions and a mutual BTC trustline, the two of them trading with each other for years. That account is unnamed too. The chain will tell you who someone dealt with; it will not tell you who they were.

Since the software and the ledger were written by the same small group, a founding address embedded in the client — a constant, a seed, even a comment — would be there to find. We checked the source as it stood on 1 January 2013, the day ledger 32,570 closed. It holds twelve address literals in total, and the only founding account among them is the genesis account, which is there because its private key is a published default. None of the other 135 appears anywhere.

That check, the repository it was called at the time, and what the genesis account’s published key means for how that account looks today, are covered in the lost-ledgers article.

State at ledger 32,570 was read with ledger_data (260 objects: 136 AccountRoot, 65 DirectoryNode, 53 RippleState, 4 Offer, 2 LedgerHashes). Current state came from ledger_entry on the trustline’s own index, plus account_lines, account_info and account_tx. All against s1.ripple.com.

The immutability claim is the strongest one here and rests on a single comparison anyone can repeat: request ledger entry 908D554A…0635DB at ledger 32,570 and at validated, and read PreviousTxnLgrSeq in both. If the two numbers match, the object has not been written to in between. They match.