$4.2 million worth of XRP tokens stolen during a hack on Ripple executive’s personal accounts earlier this week have been identified and frozen, revealed Binance CEO Richard Teng.
In a post on the X platform, Teng said developers behind the XRP Ledger (XRPL) had flagged the exploit to exchanges and requested them to keep an eye out for deposits linked to exploiter wallet addresses.
“We will continue to support Ripple in their investigations and their efforts to retrieve back the funds, including closely monitoring the majority of funds still in the exploiter’s external wallets in case they deposit to Binance,” Teng posited.
Responding to Teng’s post, Thomas Silkjaer, the head of analytics and compliance at the XRP Ledger Foundation, explained that the wallets from which the tokens were stolen belonged to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen — not of Ripple, the company. Silkjaer also claimed it was the XRPL foundation that first investigated the exploit.
This Year’s Largest Hack So Far
As ZyCryto reported, the price of XRP dropped by over 5% after news of the hack on Ripple emerged.
However, Ripple chief executive officer Bradley Garlinghouse quickly clarified that no Ripple-controlled wallets had been compromised and stressed the security of the company’s infrastructure.
This is easily the largest hack of 2024 so far after the theft of 213 million XRP tokens. The $4.2 million frozen by Binance is certainly good news. However, it’s a tiny portion of the $113 million in XRP that the hacker stole from Larsen.
Notably, other digital asset exchanges, including OKX and Kraken, are yet to announce if they have identified or frozen any tokens tied to Wednesday’s exploit.