XRP Ledger bug for 11 years could have let an attacker mint XRP beyond the 100 billion cap

A coding error introduced in 2015 could have let a malicious actor bypass XRP Ledger’s hard 100 billion XRP supply limit and create new coins that could then be spent like ordinary XRP. For high-risk payment businesses, the point is not the drama of “infinite tokens” but the mechanics: a flaw in transaction handling on the built-in decentralized exchange could have turned orderbook activity into token creation.

1. The vulnerability was tied to an overflow bug in the way XRP Ledger processed large trades on its встроенной decentralized exchange. When the system handled a single transaction that closed several hundred sell orders at once, it asked how much XRP to debit from the buyer. If the amount was too large and exceeded the maximum allowed value, the system wrapped it into a small number.
2. That meant the sellers were paid the full amounts they asked for, while the buyer was charged only the wrapped small amount plus the fee. The difference — the large amount that should not have existed — appeared as newly created XRP tokens.
3. To pull this off, an attacker would have needed to create several hundred accounts, place on each account a sell order for a tiny amount of some token in exchange for a very large amount of XRP, and then buy all of those orders in one payment. The attack cost would have been only a few hundred drops, the minimum unit of XRP, plus standard fees and reserves for creating accounts and orders. Those funds are returned when the objects are deleted.
4. The newly minted XRP could then be freely moved, exchanged, or sent to exchanges. The developers said they fixed the vulnerability, and the RippleX team said there is no evidence of exploitation in any public network.
5. The disclosure comes a few months after a bug was found in the Zcash private blockchain that allowed unlimited fake ZEC tokens to be created inside a pool. That issue had existed since May 2022.