Late in the evening of January 14th, the trading of a whopping 25.6 billion XRP (equivalent to approximately $15 billion) of XRP, almost half of the total circulating supply of approximately $54.26 billion, set off alarm bells in the cryptocurrency industry. This is an unknown wallet from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.
Was 25.6 billion XRP actually moved?
But further investigation exposed As confirmed by Bitfinex Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Paolo Ardoino, this was a failed attempt to exploit the “partial payment” feature of the XRP Ledger.
This incident was reported by Whale Alert, a famous blockchain tracking platform. reported This initial report, which was later retracted, caused a stir in the market and raised concerns about a potential security breach of the XRP ledger that could have a serious impact on the XRP market price.
Whale Alert acknowledged the reporting error with the following explanation: “There was an issue reading Ripple node responses properly, resulting in several incorrect posts. We solved the problem.” Paolo Ardoino, who is also CEO of Tether, commented on the incident: “Someone attempted to attack Bitfinex via a ‘partial payment exploit.’ The attack failed because Bitfinex properly handles the ‘delivered_amount’ data field.”
Ardoino also referenced a section on xrpl.org detailing partial payments. This feature of the
The exploit lies in the ability to manipulate this functionality to fool exchanges and gateways. An important factor in preventing this exploit is for the platform to use the ‘delivered_amount’ metadata field rather than the Amount field to determine the actual amount delivered.
In this particular case, the attacker only sent 16 XRP. This is in stark contrast to the reported 25.6 billion XRP. This small transaction triggered an alert in the on-chain monitoring system due to the way the Whale Alert system processes and reports transactions.
The attackers also attempted other exchanges.
Blockchain data also shows that similar attempts have failed at other popular cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance faced transfer attempts of 58.9 billion XRP, Bitstamp targeted With 26,200,000 XRP transferred. These transactions, like those targeting Bitfinex, were part of the exploiters’ strategy and did not result in significant amounts of cryptocurrency being transferred.
At press time, XRP’s market price has shown resilience to these events, remaining stable at $0.58. Nonetheless, XRP weakness returned to strength by yesterday’s weekly close. The price closed below the critical resistance of $0.59, which is the 0.5 Fibonacci retracement level. However, the bulls have at least managed to defend the 200-day exponential moving average (EMA).
Featured image from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com
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