Bitfinex Thwarts XRP Theft Worth IDR 234 Trillion

JAKARTA - Bitfinex, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, recently faced exploit attempts involving XRP, Ripple's cryptocurrency. XRP is the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, reaching IDR 488 trillion according to the latest data from Coingecko.

On January 14, 2024, the large transaction tracking platform Whale Alert reported a transfer of 25.6 billion (worth Rp234 trillion) from an anonymous crypto wallet to the Bitfinex exchange. However, the transaction turned out to be part of a failed exploit attempt, which aims to trick Bitfinex into assuming the transfer was valid.

Paolo Ardoino, Bitfinex's Chief Technology Officer, revealed that the attack took advantage of a partial payment feature in the Ledger XRP network, where the number of transactions could mislead the receiver assuming full fund transfer, even though only part of it was sent. Ardoino explained that the attack was successfully thwarted because the Bitfinex system correctly identified and marked the transfer as "partial payment."

This exploit attempt may be made to open a security gap in Bitfinex, which could result in huge losses to the exchange and its users. Knowing the exploit attack, Bitfinex immediately handled the 'delivered_amount' data field, to prevent this exploit from happening.

Whale Alert then withdrew its warning about the XRP transaction, admitting an error in reading the Ripple node response which caused the error in uploading XRP transaction information in X post. Whale Alert also said that they would improve their system to avoid similar errors in the future.

Although this incident is somewhat worrying, the market remains unaffected. The price of XRP shows a stable trend, only down 0.3% on the day, and traded in the range of $0.58 (Rp 9,066) per coin. XRP still has a strong fan base, despite facing lawsuits from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accusing Ripple of selling XRP as an unregistered securities offering.