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Ripple’s co-founder and executive chairman revealed on Tuesday that hackers stole approximately $112 million in Ripple-specific cryptocurrency XRP from a cryptocurrency wallet.
Ripple’s Chris Larsen said on Wednesday that the stolen cryptocurrency belonged to him.Larsen I wrote to X (Formerly Twitter) “Several of my personal XRP accounts (not Ripple) have had unauthorized access. We quickly discovered the issue and notified the exchange to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved. ”
Larsen wrote this post less than an hour after prominent cryptocurrency security researcher ZachXBT announced the news of the hack.
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in Post to X, the crypto security researcher added that the stolen XRP funds have already been laundered through several cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms, including Binance and Kraken. Binance spokesperson Simon Matthews told TechCrunch that the company is “aware of the investigation and is actively assisting.”
“We are aware of the incident. We have incident response capabilities to identify incidents like this, work with victims, and prevent Kraken from being used in this manner. We are engaged in an active review of open source to help improve the quality of our products,” Kraken spokesperson Megan Thorpe told TechCrunch via email.
However, the details of who controls and owns the hacked wallet are unclear, as it may or may not be a Ripple wallet.
According to on-chain data According to XRPScan, the hacked wallet is called “Ripple (50)” and was activated by another wallet named “~FundingWallet1” on November 5, 2018. activated According to Mr. Larsen’s testimony, on February 6, 2013, about a month after his statement. my account~chrislarsen, was created.
When TechCrunch contacted Ripple, Ripple spokesperson Stacey Go said, referring to Larsen’s post, “Ripple is not affected.”
Ripple has been around since 2012 and aims to become a payment and enterprise infrastructure provider consisting of a network, protocol, and decentralized public ledger called the XRP Ledger. The network’s token, XRP, has a market capitalization of $27.4 billion and fell about 4% the day after news of the hack, according to CoinMarketCap. data.
Some XRP holders are currently asking co-founders to disclose their crypto wallets and XRP holdings to increase transparency, but some like Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edwards There are some people. call out “We will distance ourselves from Ripple as much as possible,” Larsen said.
This hack is the largest cryptocurrency theft of 2024 so far and the 20th largest cryptocurrency theft in recorded history. Based on data collected by Rekta website that tracks Web3 and cryptocurrency.
Last year, hackers stole about $2 billion in cryptocurrencies, according to a cryptocurrency security firm that tracks this type of hacking.
This article has been updated to include a statement from a Kraken spokesperson.
