The XRP Ledger Foundation defended its decision to bypass the standard XRP Ledger revision process, stating that it was due to a serious security vulnerability that malicious actors could have used to mint trillions of XRP.

The foundation also made it clear that no unauthorized XRP tokens were minted, and clarified some misunderstandings surrounding this recently disclosed vulnerability. This vulnerability could put the $94 billion market value of XRP at risk.

The foundation confirmed that this vulnerability could indeed potentially bypass the fixed supply cap of XRP, but they also stated that the vulnerability, which has now been fixed, has never been exploited on the public internet.

The security company driven by AI Veria Labs has discovered this vulnerability. Researchers from this team stated that they found a flaw in the XRP Ledger payment engine, which is said to have existed since 2015. If exploited, a single transaction could generate approximately 18.45 trillion XRP, which is 180 times more than the initial supply of XRP.

No XRP was created.

The foundation responded to speculation regarding the possible addition of new XRP supply, namely unauthorized coin minting.

The foundation stated that all balances of XRP are public information, therefore if new XRP is indeed minted, it will be clearly visible in the publicly available ledger data.

The foundation also stated that network supply will continue to be monitored, and the supply data will be verified by community members as well.

Doubts about Centralization

The foundation also responded to criticism regarding the unusual process adopted for the release of this security patch.

Normally, when someone proposes changes to the XRP Ledger protocol, those changes can only take effect after obtaining the approval of over 80% of the trusted validators for two consecutive weeks. However, the XRP Ledger Foundation points out that the risk with this process is that it allows potential attackers several weeks to exploit the vulnerabilities before they are fixed and put into use.

Given that vulnerabilities are now easily discovered and can be reverse-engineered, especially with the help of artificial intelligence, developers believe that they need to carry out software updates immediately.

Therefore, there was a coordinated and urgent response among the XRP Ledger Foundation, RippleX, core developers, and validators.

Verifiers received the patched software on September 25th, and the public binary files were also released on the same day.

The XRP Ledger Foundation stated that no single individual has the power to force network participants to adopt this software update.