Hacker Fails to Steal $15B in XRP from Bitfinex: Details

Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive of Bitfinex, a digital asset firm established in 2012, has officially revealed that a hacker attempted to steal a whopping $15 billion in Ripple (XRP) tokens from the platform. 

However, the executive confirmed that the hacker’s attempts to steal the funds using a feature of the XRP Ledger failed after the transaction was noticed. Notably, the actual transaction that went successfully was worth only a few cents because the hacker did not have the money to carry out the transaction. 

Hacker Failed to Steal XRP Worth $15B

Ardoino confirmed that the transaction was part of the “partial payments exploit” strategy that the hacker tried to implement. The transaction was first highlighted in an X post by Whale Alert, which was later deleted. 

In the now-deleted post, Whale Alert pointed out a transaction of 25.6 billion XRP, which amounts to nearly half of XRP’s circulating supply. However, the account later posted that there was “an issue with properly reading the Ripple node response, resulting in a few wrong posts.”

On the other hand, Ardoino later explained that “someone attempted to attack” Bitfinex, with the potential attacker expecting that the exchange had incorrectly configured its software to process partial payments. 

As per separate transaction data, the attacker also tried to attack the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, with a 58.9 billion XRP transfer, but that transaction also failed.

Hacks in 2024

The pace of hacks in the digital asset space does not seem to slow down in 2024 as well. Recently, the official X account of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was hacked and was used to promote fake news of the approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETC). 

According to earlier reports from TheCoinRise, Radiant Capital, a well-known cross-chain lending protocol, suspended its lending and borrowing markets on the Arbitrum network following a $4.5 million hack.