Ripple Executive Chairman Chris Larsen said the stolen funds all came from his “personal XRP accounts” in response to a report from blockchain analyst ZachXBT.
Jerrymusa.com reports that wednesday saw a more than 5% decline in Ripple’s XRP coin due to rumors that the network may have been breached for $112.5 million.
In an explanation posted on X (formerly Twitter), Chris Larsen, the Executive Chairman of Ripple, stated that the compromise only affected his “personal XRP accounts,” not Ripple as a whole.
“We were able to identify the issue and alert exchanges to freeze the impacted addresses quite rapidly. Already, law enforcement is involved,” stated Larsen.
Network expert ZachXBT first brought attention to the matter on X, claiming that 213 million XRP tokens had been taken out of a sizable wallet on the XRP Leger network.
After then, the money was laundered via a number of exchanges, including OKX, Kraken, and Binance.
The Ripple (XRP) cryptocurrency is the native token of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain with a focus on payments, and it is now the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.
The network is utilized by Ripple Labs, the firm that created it, to power products like RippleNet, a cross-border payments platform designed with financial institutions in mind.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs in 2020 on the grounds that it had engaged in fraud by offering XRP coins for sale without first registering them as securities.
Although Larsen was specifically mentioned in the lawsuit, he and his business were granted a significant win in July 2023 when a judge refrained from classifying XRP as an outright security.