Ripple (XRP) is one of the first cryptocurrencies to have survived time and narrative news. However, a massive attack could have shaken the project. Fortunately more fear than harm.
Ripple: Half of XRP on the move
Sunday January 14, the X account (Twitter) Whale Alert published a message that was surprising to say the least. Thus, the bot detected a transfer of no less than $15 billion in XRP to the Bitfinex platform.
Obviously, it didn’t take much to alert the community to this massive movement. Indeed, for comparison, XRP has a capitalization of 31 billion dollars. So, this alleged transaction would have moved half of the circulating supplyenough to cause a few cold sweats.
However, Whale Alert quickly deleted the post and declared having met “an issue with the Ripple node response reading correctly, resulting in some erroneous posts”.
An attempted attack that falls through
According to Paolo Ardoinotechnical director of Bitfinex, an attacker attempted to exploit XRP’s partial payments feature to attack the exchangewithout success.
So, according to him, the transaction of almost $15 billion in XRP never took place. It therefore appears that an attacker attempted to attack Bitfinex via a “ exploitation of partial payments ».
The attacker started on the assumption that Bitfinex had incorrectly configured its software to process partial payments. Therefore, if this had indeed been the case, the software would not have been able to read the transaction amount field.
For their part, the attacker sends a much smaller amount specified in another transaction field and aims to receive credit for the difference.
However, Ardoino noted that the attack failed, because ” Bitfinex correctly handles the ‘delivered_amount’ data field “. According to blockchain data, the attacker also attempted an attack on Binance with a transfer of 58.9 billion XRP, which also failed. Fortunately for Ripple and Bitfinex, for whom this attack could have been devastating.
Last week, another major hack made headlines. It’s about SEC X account hack. The hacker then published a false announcement of approval of the Bitcoin Spot ETF, causing significant market movements.