Ripple chief executive officer (CEO) Brad Garlinghouse has strongly denied the news of co-founder Chris Larsen's personal XRP accounts getting hacked. This is coming after it was reported that Chris Larsen lost up to $112.5 million worth of XRP tokens.
Brad Garlinghouse reacted to the news via a post on his X account, tagging it as "irresponsible speculation and reporting" targeted at questioning the safety of XRP wallets.
"NO Ripple-managed wallets were compromised. Full stop," the XRP executive said.
However, Ripple's co-founder, Chris Larsen, had previously confirmed malicious activities on his personal Ripple account. He stated that the hack was isolated, which prevented the hacker from gaining access to his funds.
Contrary to Chris Larsen claims, cryptocurrency investigator ZachXBT reported the theft of approximately $112.5 million worth of XRP was involved in the hack.
This led to a decline in the XRP trading price. Per a ZackXBT report on Wednesday afternoon, the hackers stole up to 223 million XRP tokens worth around $112.5 million from a Ripple wallet linked to Chris Larsen.
The ZackXBT team added that the stolen funds are being sent to other crypto exchanges like Binance and Kraken.
To address potential misinformation, a community note on X was released, clarifying that Ripple's infrastructure remained secure and that the security breach only affected Larsen's personal holdings.
However, ZachXBT brought to light the misattribution of Larsen's compromised account, incorrectly labeled as belonging to Ripple, in XRP block explorers. He highlighted the omission of Larsen's position as co-founder and executive chairman of Ripple in the community note.
Analyzing with the 20-EMA indicator, XRP will need more bullish power to move above the $0.54 price level. Its support level of $0.50 seems to be weakening as the price keeps retesting around the range. The XRP/USDT could see a new support at $0.46 if bears gain more power in the market.
As of the time of writing, Ripple (XRP) is trading at $0.4969 with a $1,126,428,006.14 trading volume in the past 24 hours. XRP has a circulating supply of 54 billion tokens and is valued at a market cap of $27,004,017,481.
This significant hack stands as the largest cryptocurrency theft of the year thus far in 2024. In the preceding year, the cryptocurrency industry witnessed approximately $2 billion worth of cryptocurrencies being stolen in various hacks, as reported by several crypto security firms.
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