25 Billion XRP Transaction? Here Are Facts

Whale Alert recently spotlighted the movement of 25 billion XRP, nearly half of XRP’s circulating supply, to crypto exchange Bitfinex, in an attempt to exploit the exchange.

Touted as the most advanced on-chain whale tracking resource in the industry, Whale Alert might have unknowingly caused a stir in the XRP community with a recent erroneous disclosure.

25B XRP Reportedly Moves to Bitfinex

The whale tracking tool revealed in a post on X that an unidentified wallet had moved 25,601,477,777 (25.6 billion) XRP worth $14.85 billion to prominent cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. According to the disclosure, the transaction occurred yesterday 19:32 (UTC).

This alert caused a stir within the XRP community, as it represented the single largest XRP transaction of all time. In addition, the transaction involved nearly 50% of all the XRP tokens currently in circulation. Note that XRP has a circulating supply of 54.26 billion tokens.

A transaction of this magnitude would without doubt cause a massive impact on the price of XRP. The fact that it purportedly involved an inflow to an exchange compounded investor angst, as market participants typically send assets to exchanges for selloffs.

However, shortly after the disclosure, the Whale Alert X account deleted its post on the movement. The team then sent out a statement an hour after the reported transaction occurred, confirming that it encountered an issue while attempting to read the XRP Ledger node response.

They noted that, as a result of this issue, the Whale Alert bot sent out some wrong posts regarding XRP movements. The reported 25.6 billion XRP transaction was one of these erroneous posts.

Here are the Facts

Interestingly, an investigation carried out by The Crypto Basic confirms that a market participant did initiate the 25.6 billion XRP transaction last night. Data from XRPL explorer Bithomp suggests that the address in question was activated by ChangeNOW yesterday.

The address initiated a 25.6 billion XRP transaction shortly after creating a trust line of $1 billion. However, the transaction failed, as its balance was not up to the specified amount. 

Nonetheless, due to the technical issues with reading the XRPL node response, the Whale Alert bot flagged the transaction as successful, and erroneously made a disclosure on it. As of press time, the address is currently inactive, having been deleted today at 04:27 (UTC).

Attempted Hack

Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of Bitfinex, shed light on the purpose of the transactions in a recent post on X. According to Ardoino, an attacker attempted to hack Bitfinex with a partial payments exploit.

Someone attempted to attack @bitfinex via "Partial Payments Exploit".
Attack failed since Bitfinex properly handles 'delivered_amount' data field.https://t.co/EiGw9UQmmq

(updated with better gif) https://t.co/8I7vlO05ou pic.twitter.com/DxOnJLLkhU

— Paolo Ardoino ? (@paoloardoino) January 14, 2024

Notably, on the XRP Ledger, when a network participant is making a payment, there is an option called “Partial Payment” that allows the sender to send less money than what is stated in the “Amount” field. 

A partial payments exploit seeks to take advantage of this XRPL flag by inputting a large amount in the “Amount” field, but instead sending a much smaller amount. The exploiter then hopes that the recipient’s system is programmed to primarily focus on the “Amount” field instead of the “Delivered Amount” field.

However, Ardoino confirmed that the attempted attack failed because the Bitfinex system focuses on the “Delivered Amount” field. As a result, the transaction was rejected.

Interestingly, The Crypto Basic discovered that another address attempted a similar exploit on Bitfinex, involving multiple 50 billion XRP and 14 billion XRP transactions yesterday. They also attempted to exploit Binance with a similar hack involving 50 billion XRP transactions.