A flaw in the XRP Ledger’s payment system could have let an attacker create large amounts of new XRP without paying for it, breaking the token’s fixed-supply rule, according to a security report published Friday.

The bug, believed to date to 2015, was found by researcher Cayden Liao and Veria AI and internally reported on Sept. 22. Engineers at RippleX, Ripple’s developer arm, reproduced the attack on a standalone server and confirmed the newly created XRP could be spent in a later transaction.

RippleX said it found no evidence the flaw was exploited on any public network.

All 100 billion XRP were created when the ledger launched in 2012, and its software is built so no more can ever be added. But the security vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to create XRP from nothing and sell it on exchanges, undercutting a supply cap that institutions using the network rely on.

The attack worked through the ledger’s built-in exchange, where accounts post offers to swap one token for another.

An attacker would open hundreds of accounts, have each one offer a tiny amount of a token in exchange for an unusually large amount of XRP, then send a single payment that bought every offer at once.

The total XRP owed would be too large for the software to count correctly, so the attacker’s selling accounts would be paid in full while the buying account was charged almost nothing — leaving the attacker with XRP that hadn’t existed before.

The XRP Ledger runs a check after every transaction to make sure no new XRP has appeared, but that check relied on the same miscounted total and would have missed it.

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