Attempted $15 Billion XRP Transfer Revealed as Failed Exploit

The reported transaction involving the transfer of nearly $15 billion worth of XRP to Bitfinex on January 14 turned out to be part of an unsuccessful exploit, according to Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer at Bitfinex. The attacker tried to leverage XRP’s partial payments feature to exploit the cryptocurrency exchange but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Initially brought to light by the blockchain tracking Twitter account Whale Alert, the transaction claimed to involve 25.6 billion XRP—almost half of XRP’s circulating supply—from an unidentified wallet to Bitfinex. However, Whale Alert later deleted the post, citing an issue with accurately interpreting the Ripple node response, leading to some incorrect posts.

Ardoino clarified on Twitter that someone had attempted to attack Bitfinex through a “Partial Payments Exploit.” The attacker believed that the exchange had misconfigured its software to process partial payments.

The partial payments exploit typically assumes that a company’s system is incorrectly configured, only reading the amount field of an XRP transaction, which is set to a high amount. In reality, the exploiter sends a much smaller amount specified in another transaction field, aiming to receive credit for the difference.

Despite the attempt, Ardoino highlighted that the attack failed because Bitfinex properly handles the ‘delivered_amount’ data field. Blockchain data also revealed that the attacker unsuccessfully tried a similar attack on Binance, involving a transfer of 58.9 billion XRP.