An unchecked integer overflow in the XRP Ledger’s payment engine could have created spendable XRP beyond the intended 100 billion supply limit. The flaw was in how the software added amounts across many order-book offers—not in XRP escrow—and the XRP Ledger Foundation says it found no evidence that the exploit was used on a public network. A fix shipped in xrpld 3.4.1 on September 25, 2026.
How the bug could have created XRP
A payment through an order book can consume multiple offers. Each offer’s XRP amount could be valid on its own, but the payment engine added those amounts using unchecked 64-bit integer arithmetic. When enough unusually large amounts were summed, the total could exceed the integer’s limit and wrap around to a much smaller number.
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The engine could then pay each offer owner the full amount while charging the buyer only the wrapped total. The shortfall would be newly created XRP: the ledger would have credited more XRP than the transaction took from the payer. This was a software accounting flaw that could have broken the intended supply limit, not evidence that XRP’s published supply arrangement or escrow changed.
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What an attack required
An attacker would have needed to create hundreds of accounts and place offers selling tiny amounts of another token for enormous amounts of XRP. The attacker could control those accounts. Because the offers were priced so poorly, they would sit below real market liquidity; a purpose-built payment would have to reach and consume them together. Routine payments and trades could not trigger the overflow accidentally.
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Why the flaw stayed hidden
The XRP Ledger Foundation’s disclosure says investigation suggests the bug had been present since the current payment engine was written in 2015. Ordinary transactions did not add amounts anywhere near the 64-bit limit, so the vulnerable path remained dormant until a deliberately constructed set of offers could push the aggregate sum over that limit.
Two checks that might have exposed the accounting error failed for different reasons:
- The “no XRP created” invariant used vulnerable arithmetic too. It summed changes with the same kind of 64-bit arithmetic, so it wrapped in the same way. The apparent net change looked like an ordinary transaction fee rather than newly created XRP.
- The per-account check did not catch distributed balances. It would fail if one account held more XRP than the total supply. The exploit could spread the newly credited XRP across hundreds of accounts, keeping each individual balance below that threshold.
The limitation matters because invariants are intended to check whether a transaction’s changes preserve system properties before those changes are committed. The XRP Ledger Community Blog’s 2017 explanation of its EnforceInvariants amendment describes that role. In this case, the check shared the arithmetic failure it was meant to detect.
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The Foundation says the vulnerability was reported through the XRPL Bug Bounty program on September 22, 2026. RippleX engineers reproduced the mint on a local standalone server and in unit tests, and confirmed that the resulting XRP could be spent in a follow-up payment. The report credits Cayden Liao and Veria AI with the original report and proof of concept; engineers raised its severity from Major to critical.
The fix shipped in xrpld 3.4.1 on September 25, 2026. Its defenses address both parts of the failure: checked additions detect when sums across offers or payment paths would overflow, causing the affected path to fail cleanly, and the “no XRP created” check now uses a wider counter that cannot wrap in the same way. The disclosure also describes precautionary hardening of other balance-summing code.
Rather than wait for the usual amendment activation process, the team made the fix effective as individual servers upgraded. The Foundation’s report says more than 80 percent of default UNL validators were running version 3.4.1 or later on release day, before the fix’s source code was published. That figure is the disclosure’s account of validator upgrades, not an independently verified census.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Was the XRP supply bug exploited?
The Foundation’s disclosure says there is no evidence the vulnerability was exploited on a public network. That supports saying the bug could have created XRP, but not that it actually inflated the XRP supply on Mainnet. The engineers’ reproduction on a local server and in tests demonstrated the mechanism; it does not establish a public-network exploit.
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