No decentralized exchanges or crypto mixer services were used by the exploit’s hacker.
The hacked accounts were Larsen’s personal ones, not Ripple’s.
After the biggest breach of 2024 thus far—a $112 million attack on Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s personal wallet on January 31—cryptocurrency exchange Binance froze $4.2 million worth of XRP.
Richard Teng, CEO of Binance, took to social media to announce that the exchange has blocked the exploiter’s address. He also expressed gratitude to Ripple and on-chain detective ZachXBT for their assistance.
No Crypto Mixer Services Utilized
The XRP Ledger Foundation’s head of analytics and compliance, Thomas Silkjaer, replied to Teng’s tweet by asserting that his organization was the one who first looked into the matter.
Initial reports indicated that Ripple may have been compromised, with some rumors even going so far as to say that the XRP token was compromised. The hacked accounts were Larsen’s personal ones, not Ripple’s, as he would subsequently admit.
No decentralized exchanges or crypto mixer services were used by the exploit’s hacker to conceal their identity. To stay one step ahead of potential funds freezes, most exploiters have recently abandoned centralized exchanges.
XRPScan and Bithomp, two XRP block explorers, incorrectly attributed the compromised account to Ripple, which caused more uncertainty on the attack, as ZachXBT subsequently disclosed.
The hacking incident that affected Ripple co-founder Larsen’s personal XRP accounts resulted in the theft of 213 million XRP. In addition to notifying law authorities, Larsen added that Ripple is in discussions with cryptocurrency exchanges to block the address of the exploiter.
Some of the stolen assets have already been blocked by Binance, while other cryptocurrency exchanges like OKX and Kraken have been mum on whether they have found or frozen any funds linked to the breach.