AI Finds XRP Ledger Flaw That Could Create 18 Trillion XRP

Veria Labs reported the vulnerability on Sept. 22, and developers released a patch three days later. RippleX publicly disclosed the issue on Oct. 9 after its engineers reproduced the exploit. Investigators found no evidence that attackers used it on public networks, that unauthorized XRP was created or that funds were lost.

The flaw affected rippled, the software that runs the XRP Ledger. It involved two weaknesses that could be combined to bypass the network’s supply protections.

The first was an integer overflow in the payment engine. In certain trading transactions, specially prepared offers could cause the software to miscalculate the amount owed by a buyer. A seller would receive the full XRP amount while the buyer would pay only part of it. The difference could create XRP that had not previously existed.

The second weakness affected the ledger’s supply-protection mechanism. It used the same faulty arithmetic and could fail to detect the newly created tokens. Veria estimated that one payment transaction could have created about 18 trillion XRP, roughly 180 times the cryptocurrency’s original 100 billion-token supply.

An attacker would have needed to prepare hundreds of accounts and trading offers. The attack required a few hundred XRP for mostly refundable account reserves and normal transaction fees.

The payment-engine code dated to 2015, while the affected supply safeguard was added in 2017. Veria founder Cayden Liao described the flaw as a threat to XRP’s fixed supply and reported that the company received a $250,000 bounty, the maximum available under the program.

Veria’s AI security system found the issue, built a working exploit and tested it on a local network. The flaw had survived more than a dozen audits and security contests since 2024, including one with a $550,000 prize pool. XRP Ledger bug bounty programs had paid more than $1 million before the discovery.

The severity of the flaw led RippleX, the XRP Ledger Foundation and validators to bypass the network’s normal amendment process. Under that process, changes to transaction rules require support from more than 80% of trusted validators for two consecutive weeks.

Developers instead coordinated an emergency upgrade that activated protection on servers running version 3.4.1. The patch was first distributed as software binaries without source code, limiting the chance that attackers could study the vulnerability before the fix took effect.

The emergency upgrade created a risk that servers running different versions could disagree about whether transactions were valid. Such a split could have disrupted consensus or halted the network. More than 80% of validators on the default trusted-validator list had upgraded by Sept. 25, and version 3.4.1 became the minimum required release.

RippleX head of engineering J. Ayo Akinyele outlined plans for more AI-assisted testing, additional reviews of older code and faster use of formal verification, which applies mathematical tests to software security requirements. The organization also now requires resolved security findings to be tested against release candidates before they are closed.