2024

<p><em>Tether and Bitfinex are the last ones to hold ‘old crypto’ after all these collapses. Please, don’t fail in 2024 and spoil the party for everyone</em>.” This is the comment left by a crypto-NFT investor under the post of Paolo Ardoino when he tweeted about the thwarted attack against Bitfinex yesterday. But what really happened on the side of this exchange? Explanations!</p>
<h2 id="h-a-15-billion-thwarted-xrp-hack">A $15 Billion Thwarted XRP Hack</h2>
<p>De.Fi company claimed to have tallied <a href="https://www.cointribune.com/en/the-amount-of-losses-due-to-crypto-hacks-and-scams-reduced-by-half-in-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">about <strong>$2 billion worth of hacked cryptocurrencies</strong></a><strong> in 2023</strong>. Even though this figure represents only <strong>half of the amount stolen in 2022</strong>, we can agree that hackers are not ready to leave the crypto industry in peace.</p>
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     <p lang="en" dir="ltr">An attacker unsuccessfully attempted to compromise the Bitfinex exchange via some of XRP’s payment functions. Whale Alert initially reported a transaction worth nearly $15 billion involving 25.6 billion XRP that was later confirmed to be an attempted attack. Bitfinex blocked the…</p>— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) <a href="https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain/status/1746748922654330978?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">January 15, 2024</a>
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  Thwarted hacking attempt on Bitfinex
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<p>Based on tweets from Whales Alert and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and CTO of Bitfinex, <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/unknown-wallet-xrp-transfer-bitfinex-partial-payments-exploit" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Cointelegraph</a> provided details on the <strong>Bitfinex hacking attempt that took place last January 14th</strong>. To achieve his ends, the hacker had to use this kind of trickery: he had <strong>resorted to the XRP partial payment function</strong> using an <strong>anonymous wallet</strong>.</p>
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<p>If successful, he could have siphoned the crypto XRP equivalent of $15 billion. Fortunately, Blockchain Tracking, through its X Whale Alert account, was able to smell the ruse in time. Its tweet reporting a transaction of 25.6 billion XRP, nearly half of the total circulating supply, was deleted due to misunderstandings with the Ripple node.</p>
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   This Whale Alert tweet has been retracted.
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<p>“<em>Someone tried to attack Bitfinex through ‘Partial Payments Exploit’. The attack failed because Bitfinex properly manages the ‘delivered_amount’ data field</em>,” Paolo Ardoino posts despite the deletion of the initial Whale Alert post.</p>

Doubtful transfer of XRP crypto: Bitfinex narrowly escapes a bloody attack

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