The price of the native token of the XRP Ledger, XRP, has fallen by around 5% after Ripple Chairman Chris Larsen confirmed that over $120 million worth of the cryptocurrency were taken from “a few” of his personal XRP accounts.
In a post on the microblogging platform X (formerly known as Twitter), Larsen confirmed that a hacker managed to gain unauthorized access to a few of his personal XRP accounts and stole around 213 million XRP tokens. Larsen’s post came in response to crypto analyst ZachXBT revealing that it appeared Ripple itself had been hacked.
Notably, Larsen didn’t confirmed the amount reported by ZachXBT, which used on-chain data to trace the stolen funds being moved to various cryptocurrency trading platforms including MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, HitBTC, and OKX.
Per Larsen, these cryptocurrency exchanges were rapidly notified of the security breach so they could freeze the affected addresses. Moreover, Larsen confirmed that law enforcement “is already involved” in the case.
The price of XRP dropped from around $0.525 to now trade just slightly below $0.50 over the news, as the initial reports suggested Ripple – a major player in the XRP ecosystem – had itself been hacked. Others have questioned the size of Larsen’s personal XRP holdings.
The incident comes at a time in which validators on the XRP Ledger have been moving to approve a controversial feature that will introduce a pivotal functionality for developers allowing the reversal of token transactions under specific circumstances, such as suspected fraud or aiding users in regaining access to their accounts in cases of lost credentials.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the XRP Ledger could soon receive an upgrade that will introduce a built-in automated market maker (AMM) trading platform into the ledger, allowing $XRP token holders to earn income on-chain. The proposal to introduce it has now been gaining support from validators.
Featured image via Unsplash.
