Who Is Behind the Ripple Hack?

According to internet detective ZachXBT, Ripple co-founder and chairman Chris Larsen reported on January 31st that his personal accounts had been hacked.

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The news was first reported by crypto analyst ZachXBT, and it was initially thought that the company itself had been hacked.

Yesterday, there was unauthorized access to a few of my personal XRP accounts (not @Ripple) – we were quickly able to catch the problem and notify exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved. https://t.co/T3HtKSlzLg

— Chris Larsen (@chrislarsensf) January 31, 2024

According to Larsen:

Yesterday, there was unauthorized access to several of my personal XRP accounts. We were able to quickly identify the issue and notify exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved.

While the Ripple CEO did not provide clear information on the lost assets, ZachXBT estimates the breach to be around 213 million XRP. The price of XRP stolen at the time of the incident was $112.5 million.

It appears @Ripple was hacked for ~213M XRP ($112.5M)

Source address
rJNLz3A1qPKfWCtJLPhmMZAfBkutC2Qojm

So far the stolen funds have been laundered through MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, HitBTC, etc pic.twitter.com/HKGYsLQeMv

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 31, 2024

However, as Larsen also mentioned, the police are now involved. The accounts from which the assets were stolen are currently frozen.

The news of the hack spread quickly; XRP’s price then dropped by about $0.01, but quickly recovered and was almost stable about an hour after the initial report of the attack.

Ripple accounts currently seem to be fully involved in the incident. However, that is not entirely the case. Because Ripple shows that XRP holder funds are safe.

The attack is one of the largest cryptocurrency-related attacks of 2024 so far.