XRP Bridge Drained After Software Treats Fake Deposits as Real

In brief

• An attacker drained nearly 200,000 XRP, worth around $202,000, from the Tx XRPL bridge.
• The bridge credited transactions that did not deliver XRP as deposits.
• Tx halted the bridge and is considering how to compensate affected users.

An attacker drained nearly 200,000 XRP, worth around $202,000, from an XRP Ledger bridge on August 9 by exploiting a flaw in its deposit-detection software, the project said.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Tx, which operates the bridge connecting the Tx Chain and the XRP Ledger, said a software flaw caused the bridge to record transactions as XRP deposits even though no XRP had been received.

“The attacker exploited the bridge's deposit-detection logic,” the company wrote. “The bridge's software incorrectly registered transactions that never actually delivered any XRP to the bridge as deposits, and minted bridged XRP on the tx chain against them.”

Tx is a layer-1 blockchain ecosystem launched in March by combining the Coreum blockchain with Sologenic, an XRP Ledger-based tokenization and trading platform.

The attacker used those fraudulent deposits to create unbacked XRP on the Tx Chain, then exchanged it through the bridge for real XRP.

According to Tx, the bridge underwent several internal and third-party audits before deployment, but the vulnerability was not identified.