XRP Flaw’s Scale Revealed: 18 Trillion Tokens Could Have Been Created in One Transaction!

Security researcher Cayden Liao said his team prepared a test showing that a flaw patched on the XRP Ledger on September 25 could have been used to create approximately 18 trillion XRP in a single transaction.

New details shared about the critical security flaw in the XRP Ledger revealed the scale of its potential impact. According to Wu Blockchain, Liao’s team showed that a bug in the payment engine could allow a specially crafted transaction to create usable XRP in an amount exceeding the network’s fixed supply.

The possibility of creating trillions of XRP in a single transaction

The approximately 18 trillion XRP disclosed by Liao represents an amount far exceeding the network’s intended total supply of 100 billion XRP. The researcher’s team demonstrated this result with a proof of concept prepared to show that the flaw could be exploited.

The bug, which had been in the code since 2015, was reported through XRPL’s bug bounty program. Liao received the program’s top reward of $250,000 for his finding.

The flaw was patched on September 25

The issue, disclosed by RippleX and the XRP Ledger Foundation, was fixed with the xrpld 3.4.1 update on September 25. More than 80% of default validators switched to the new version that same day.

XRPL said it found no evidence that the flaw had been exploited on a public network. Therefore, the disclosure about creating trillions of XRP describes the flaw’s potential as demonstrated in the researchers’ test, not an attack that actually took place.