Tech
Hackers steal $112 million from XRP Ripple cryptocurrency
Hackers stole about $112 million of the Ripple-focused XRP cryptocurrency from a crypto wallet on Tuesday, Ripple’s co-founder and executive chairman revealed.
Ripple’s Chris Larsen said Wednesday that the stolen cryptocurrency was his. Larsen wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “there was unauthorized access to some of my personal XRP (non-Ripple) accounts – we were quickly able to identify the issue and alert the exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement they are already involved.”
Larsen wrote the post less than an hour after well-known crypto security researcher ZachXBT reported the hack.
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In a post about X, the crypto security researcher added that the stolen XRP funds have already been laundered through several crypto exchanges and platforms, including Binance and Kraken. Binance spokesperson Simon Matthews told TechCrunch that the company is “aware of and actively supporting the investigation.”
“We are aware of what happened. We have an incident response capability and undertake a proactive review of open source to identify incidents like this, engage victims, and prevent Kraken from being used in this way,” Kraken spokeswoman Megan Thorpe told TechCrunch in an e-mail. email.
However, details about who controls and owns the hacked wallet are murky, as may (or may not) be Ripple’s wallet.
Second on-chain data from activated from Larsen’s story on February 6, 2013, about a month after his own account~chrislarsen, it was created.
When TechCrunch contacted Ripple, company spokesperson Stacey Ngo referenced Larsen’s post and said that “Ripple was not impacted.”
Ripple has been around since 2012 and aims to be a payments and business infrastructure provider consisting of a network, a protocol and a decentralized public ledger called the XRP Ledger. According to CoinMarketCap, the network’s token, XRP, has a market capitalization of $27.4 billion and fell about 4% the day after news of the hack broke. data.
Now, some XRP holders are calling on co-founders to disclose their crypto wallets and XRP holdings in an effort to improve transparency, while others like Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edward are doing so Calling for Larsen to “distance himself from Ripple as much as possible.”
This hack is the largest cryptocurrency theft so far in 2024 and the twentieth largest cryptocurrency theft in recorded history. based on data collected by Rekta website that tracks web3 and crypto breaches.
Last year, hackers stole approximately $2 billion in cryptocurrencyaccording to crypto security firms that track these types of hacks.
This story has been updated to include a statement from Kraken’s spokesperson.