Bitfinex Successfully Thwarted the Attempt to Manipulate the XRP Price

Bitfinex successfully thwarted the attempt to manipulate the XRP price.

On the evening of January 14, the cryptocurrency community was abuzz with the emergence of a series of large XRP token transactions from Ripple, valued at tens of billions of USD and equivalent to nearly half of the circulating XRP supply, appearing on the Bitfinex exchange.

50% of the circulating supply of #XRP has been sent to Bitfinex in a single transaction.. uhhh pic.twitter.com/U8VKrEmds1

— Tom Crown (@T0mCr0wnCrypt0_) January 14, 2024

Not stopping there, similar transactions of tens of billions of USD worth of XRP also appeared on the Binance exchange, as reported by the Whale Alert account, causing further concern among many.

Does anyone seem undecided about where to dump a large amount of $XRP or what’s going on #ripple?#Binance or #Bitfinex ⁉️ pic.twitter.com/LYpH7l6OYC

— ᑕᗩ₱₱EX (@CryptoCappex) January 14, 2024

Bitfinex’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, spoke out about the incident, revealing that there was a plot to attack Bitfinex through a vulnerability called the “Partial Payment Exploit.” According to this exploit, malicious actors would input a very large XRP value to be transferred into the “Amount” field of the transaction, but the network would only use the actual transferred amount in the “DeliveredAmount” field.

Someone attempted to attack @bitfinex via “Partial Payments Exploit”.
Attack failed since Bitfinex properly handles ‘delivered_amount’ data field.https://t.co/EiGw9UQmmq

(updated with better gif) https://t.co/8I7vlO05ou pic.twitter.com/DxOnJLLkhU

— Paolo Ardoino 🍐 (@paoloardoino) January 14, 2024

Bitfinex claims to have correctly referenced data from “DeliveredAmount,” thus not recognizing any issues, while Whale Alert used data from “Amount,” leading to posts causing confusion in the community.

Whale Alert quickly deleted the posts, acknowledging an error in referencing data from the Ripple network’s transaction processing node and addressing the issue.

🛠️ There was an issue with properly reading the #Ripple node response, resulting in a few wrong posts. We fixed the issue.

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 14, 2024