On Tuesday, hackers stole about $112 million of the Ripple-focused cryptocurrency XRP from a crypto wallet, Ripple’s co-founder and executive chairman revealed.
Ripple’s Chris Larsen said on Wednesday that the stolen crypto was his. Larsen wrote to X (formerly Twitter) that “there was unauthorized access to some of my personal XRP (not Ripple) accounts — we were able to quickly identify the problem and notify the exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved.”
Larsen wrote the post less than an hour after well-known crypto security researcher ZachXBT broke the news of the hack.
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In a post on X, the crypto security researcher added that the stolen XRP funds have already been laundered through several crypto exchanges and platforms, including Binance and Kraken. Binance spokesperson Simon Matthews told TechCrunch that the company is “aware of and actively supports the investigation.”
“We are aware of the incident. We have an incident response capability and are proactively reviewing open source to identify incidents like this, engage with victims, and prevent Kraken from being used in this way,” Kraken spokeswoman Megan Thorpe said in an email to TechCrunch.
However, the details of who controls and owns the hacked wallet are unclear, as it may — or may not — be Ripple’s wallet.
According to the chain data by XRPScan, the compromised wallet was called “Ripple (50)” and was activated by a separate wallet called “~FundingWallet1” on November 5, 2018. ~FundingWallet1 was activated from Larsen’s account on February 6, 2013, about a month after his own own account~chrislarsen, created.
When TechCrunch contacted Ripple, company spokeswoman Stacey Ngo referred to Larsen’s post and said that “Ripple was not affected.”
Ripple has been around since 2012 and aims to be a payment and business infrastructure provider consisting of a network, a protocol and a decentralized public ledger called the XRP Ledger. The network’s token, XRP, has a market cap of $27.4 billion and is down about 4% on the day following news of the hack, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Now, some XRP holders are asking the co-founders to disclose their crypto wallets and XRP holdings in an effort to improve transparency, while others, like Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edward calling for Larsen to “distance himself from Ripple as much as possible.”
This hack is the biggest cryptocurrency heist of 2024 so far and the twentieth biggest cryptocurrency heist in recorded history, based on data collected by Rekta website that monitors web3 and encryption breaches.
Last year, hackers stole about $2 billion in cryptocurrencies, according to crypto security firms that track these types of hacks.
This story has been updated to include a statement from a Kraken spokesperson.
