The $112 million breach of Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s wallet on January 31 resulted in the freezing of $4.2 million worth of XRP by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, making it the biggest hack of 2024 thus far. Binance CEO Richard Teng commended on-chain detective ZachXBT and the Ripple group for their cooperation and support in a post on social media platform X, revealing that the exchange has frozen the exploiter’s address. In response to Teng’s tweet, Thomas Silkjaer, the XRP Ledger Foundation’s head of analytics and compliance, stated that the organization was the one that looked into the matter first.
Early on, there was talk that Ripple had been compromised. According to some reports, the $0.51 XRP ticker coin had been compromised. Larsen subsequently disclosed that Ripple itself had not been compromised—rather, it was his accounts. The exploit’s hacker does not conceal their identity via decentralized exchanges or cryptocurrency mixer services.
No Further Information Has Been Received From Binance Regarding The Matter
Later, ZachXBT disclosed that uncertainty over the breach resulted from the Ripple provenance for the impacted account being identified as Ripple itself in XRP block miners XRPScan and Bithomp. Co-founder of Ripple Larsen disclosed that 213 million XRP had been taken and that a few of his own XRP accounts had been hijacked. Larsen said that Ripple has notified law authorities and is in discussions with cryptocurrency exchanges to block the exploiter address.
ZachXBT claims that after obtaining 213 million XRP, or around $112.5 million, the exploiters tried to launder the XRP through a minimum of six exchanges: MEXC, Binance, Gate.io, Kraken, HTX, OKX, and HitBTC. While some of the stolen assets have been frozen by Binance, OKX and Kraken, two other cryptocurrency exchanges, have not yet disclosed whether they have located or blocked any funds linked to the incident. When the media contacted Binance and Ripple for more information, neither company responded before the deadline for publication.
