Bitfinex $15B Transfer in XRP Was a Failed Exploit

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Bitfinex’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Paolo Ardoino stated that an XRP transaction worth nearly $15 billion, allegedly from an unknown wallet on their exchange, was actually part of a partial payment exploit that was unsuccessful.

The Whale Alert service originally reported the transfer, but later deleted the tweet and clarified that there were errors in reading the response from the Ripple node.

Ardoino explained that this was an attack on the partial payment feature, where the attacker thought the exchange’s software was not correctly configured to process such transactions.

However, Ardoino clarified that Bitfinex does have its processing configured correctly. Another attempted attack was also made on Binance with a transfer of 58.9 billion XRP, but the actual transaction amount was only 0.0017 XRP.