A hacker attempted to trick Bitfinex systems using the “partial payment” function to steal the equivalent of $15 billion in XRP

A resource from the XRP Ledger, the blockchain behind the cryptocurrencyXRP, was used by a hacker to try to execute a billion-dollar theft against the cryptocurrency exchangeBitfinexthis Monday (15),confirmedthe CTO of Bitfinex and CEO ofTether,Paolo Ardoino.

The on-chain service WhaleAlerts made an alert (now deleted) that almost US$15 billion (R$73 billion) in XRP was moved this morning, a value that is equivalent to just under half of the entire market value of thetoken, of US$31.4 billion.

The actual transfer, however, was just a few cents worth of XRP because, according toblockchain data, the sender did not have enough liquidity. Apparently, the idea was to try to trick Bitfinex into considering the transfer as real, which could have opened the door for ahack.

However, the exchange's systems understood the transfer as a “partial payment”, a feature of the XRP Ledger that allows a payment to be successful even without liquidity, reducing the amount received.

“Someone tried to attack Bitfinex via partial payments exploit,” Ardoino said on X (formerly Twitter). “The attack failed because Bitfinex correctly handles the data field (delivered_amount).”

The partial payments function

Partial payments are useful for returning payments without incurring additional costs to yourself, butreports from XRP Ledgershow that this tool is often the target of attempted attacks and scams.

“If a financial institution's integration with the XRP Ledger assumes that the Amount of a Payment field is always the total amount delivered, malicious actors could exploit this assumption to steal money from the institution,” XRP says in the documents.

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