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 the 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 us improve our capabilities,” Kraken spokesperson Megan Thorpe told TechCrunch in an 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 from XRPScan, the hacked wallet is called “Ripple (50)” and was activated by another wallet named “~FundingWallet1” on November 5, 2018. ~FundingWallet1 was activated by Larsen's account on February 6th. In 2013, about a month after his own account ~chrislarsen was created.
When TechCrunch contacted Ripple, company spokesperson Stacey Ngo said, “Ripple is not affected,” referring to Larsen's post.
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 now asking their co-founders to disclose their crypto wallets and XRP holdings to increase transparency, while others like Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edwards are It urges Larsen to “step away from Ripple as much as possible.” ”
The hack is the largest cryptocurrency theft of 2024 so far and the 20th largest cryptocurrency theft in recorded history, based on data collected by Web3 and Rekt, a website that tracks cryptocurrency. This is theft.
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.