Last night a very strange transaction took place in the crypto world.
Someone sent Ripple (XRP) worth no less than $15 billion to the major crypto exchange Bitfinex, causing quite a stir.
🎁 Start the new year well: €10 free crypto of your choice
Ripple (XRP) worth $15 billion was sent to Bitfinex
Whale Alert, a popular Twitter account that tracks large transactions, was the first to report the huge transaction yesterday.
More precisely, it would be 25.6 billion XRP worth 14.8 billion US dollars or 13.5 billion euros.
It then quickly fell to Analyst Scott Melkeralso known as “The Wolf of All Streets”, states that this transaction can never be correct.
The amount was far too high for that. It would be almost half of the total circulating supply of all XRP.
The original Twitter message has since been deleted. Paulo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and CEO of Tether, confirmed that the transaction was never completed.
XRP transactions were part of a failed attack on crypto exchanges
Ardoino further reported that the transaction was part of a failed attack on the major crypto exchange.
A so-called “partial payments exploit” was carried out against the exchange using an unknown wallet.
The hacker hoped that Bitfinex had incorrectly set up its software to process XRP transactions and was trying to exploit this.
The attacker assumed that Bitfinex had set the system to only read the “Amount” field of the transaction, which is extremely high.
Meanwhile, the attacker sent a significantly smaller amount and hoped to get the difference back. The attacker sent XRP worth just a few cents.
According to Ardoino, the attack attempt failed because Bitfinex simply configured the software correctly and entered the correct transaction data.
According to Bithomp, the attacker then also tried to attack Binance with up to 58.9 billion XRP, but this attack also failed.
Still, many users are upset with Whale Alert. They find it irresponsible that this large platform published the message of the huge fake transaction and accuse the platform of market manipulation.
“There was a problem correctly reading the #Ripple node response, which resulted in some incorrect messages. “We solved the problem,” he said Whale alert.
XRP price fluctuated briefly last night, briefly shooting to $0.593 and then falling back to $0.574. The price fluctuated again overnight and reached $0.578 this morning.
Post views: 146