XRP's Supply Cap Survives a Nine-Year-Old Bug as Institutional Money Keeps Flowing In
Published on 10/10/2026 at 12:01 | Editorial boerse-global.de
A coding flaw that had lurked in the XRP Ledger's payment engine since roughly 2015 could have let an attacker mint tokens beyond the network's hard ceiling of 100 billion — but the hole was plugged before the public ever learned of it, and RippleX says it found no sign anyone exploited it on live networks.
The vulnerability, reported to RippleX on September 22 by Cayden Liao and Veria AI, stemmed from an integer overflow in the ledger's number handling. According to CoinDesk, a single payment bundling hundreds of manipulated order-book offers could have generated XRP without a corresponding debit. Those tokens would not have been a mere display glitch: RippleX confirmed they could subsequently have been spent in further transactions.
That distinction matters enormously for holders. The flaw threatened the network's fundamental supply limit, not just the correct settlement of individual payments. Even the ledger's existing safeguards offered little protection — a sanity check relied on the same faulty accounting, and a per-account cap would have been useless because the doctored offers could be spread across hundreds of accounts.
Patch Shipped Ahead of Disclosure
RippleX released corrected software, xrpld 3.4.1, on September 25, addressing a defect present in version 3.4.0 and earlier releases. Public disclosure followed only after the fix was out.
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Notably, the developers skipped the ledger's customary amendment process. Rather than waiting for validator activation, the correction took effect directly with the software upgrade — a departure from how ordinary protocol changes are rolled out. By the day the patch landed, more than 80% of validators on the standard UNL were already running the corrected version or newer, a figure that applies to that validator list rather than to every server on the network.
The technical bar for mounting such an attack would have been low. A few hundred XRP for reserves plus additional fees would have sufficed, and most of the reserves could have been recovered afterward. The crux was precise manipulation of the offers, not sustained capital outlay.
RippleX turned up no evidence that attackers had exploited the bug on public networks, nor any related losses, compromised keys, or consensus disruptions. The reproduced attack demonstrates technical possibility, not realized damage. For XRP holders, the advisory requires no action; node operators, by contrast, are urged to update to the patched software or a newer release, since securing the infrastructure rests with those running it.
Institutional Demand Persists Through the Noise
While that drama played out behind the scenes, regulated investment vehicles kept accumulating the token. On Thursday, U.S. spot XRP ETFs logged net inflows of roughly $8 million. Franklin Templeton's XRPZ fund captured the bulk of it, absorbing about 6 million XRP that day. Even as other crypto fund categories bled assets, XRP products stood alone with a positive balance.
The buying came against a rough market backdrop. Bitcoin slipped below $84,000 on Wednesday, dragging XRP briefly from around $1.52 to near $1.46. The trigger was broad liquidation of derivatives positions rather than any XRP-specific regulatory development, with geopolitical factors and macro stress weighing on the entire sector.
Infrastructure work on the XRP Ledger has continued in parallel. CSD BR and Ripple launched the first phase of a collaboration in late September, using the network to mirror ownership records for selected shares in BTG Pactual investment funds, though official registration and settlement remain in CSD BR's systems. The ledger also switched on permission delegation, letting account holders hand specific actions to other addresses without exposing their primary signing keys, alongside new transaction-batching features. Developers cautioned in the technical documentation against delegating the burn permission for payments ahead of an upcoming cleanup, to avoid unwanted token minting by third parties.
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Where the Token Stands
Trading desks show a wait-and-see mood. Roughly 21.97 billion XRP sat in exchange custodial wallets on Thursday, according to media reports — though such holdings don't automatically represent coins actively up for sale, since internal depot transfers also sway the figures.
XRP currently changes hands at $1.40, up 0.7% on the day, putting it about 9.4% above its 200-day average of $1.28. Whether macro sentiment calms and institutional inflows can durably underpin the price will likely decide the next move.
Two threads thus define the picture: a flaw whose potential consequences were severe but which was fixed before anyone was told, and steady institutional appetite that has so far shrugged off the wider selloff. The disclosure documents a patched weakness — not a proven dilution of XRP's supply.
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