A flaw in the XRP Ledger could have allowed an attacker to mint 18 trillion XRP, 184 times the token’s original supply, by chaining together two separate vulnerabilities that had been live since 2015 and 2017. Veria Labs’ AI system found both flaws, linked them, and built a proof of concept exploit on a local network. For a ledger as heavily reviewed as XRP’s, what stands out is not just the scale of the risk, but how it survived scrutiny for nearly a decade.
Veria Labs reported the bug on September 22, and a fix was merged the next day. RippleX says there is no evidence the exploit was ever used on chain.
The broader takeaway is how this was found, and what that could change about software review. The case points toward earlier, automated security checks that test how smaller issues can combine into much bigger threats. If tools can surface exploit chains that human reviewers miss, protocol security may depend increasingly on changing how code is tested, not just who is testing it.