Shareholders of Ripple and Arrington Capital’s XRP treasury stock Evernorth Holdings would have surely loved to know that hackers could have inflated the supply of XRP by trillions of new tokens before they decided last month whether to move forward with a plan to take an XRP crypto treasury company public.
No one told them, while their share redemption window was open prior to September 28, that the XRP Ledger’s base layer payment engine had a bug allowing hackers to mint trillions of new XRP — trading today near $1.35 apiece — for almost nothing.
That bug made the fixed-supply promises of countless XRP proponents, including Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla’s claim that 100 billion XRP was a ceiling that would never move, unenforceable on the network itself.
“All 100 billion XRP tokens were created at the time of the XRP Ledger’s launch in 2012,” Evernorth’s proxy filing read. In fact, hackers could have minted orders of magnitude more over the past decade.
Although validators on the XRP Ledger have patched the bug, its existence amid Evernorth’s shareholder redemption offer is remarkable.
According to the official story, unbeknownst to XRPN shareholders — and almost everybody else on the planet — an ethical researcher privately reported the bug to Ripple’s developer arm on September 22.
Ripple then shipped an emergency, closed-source fix on September 25, obscuring that release in veiled language about “integer-arithmetic hardening.”
Shareholders faced a September 28 redemption deadline to redeem XRPN shares for cash and/or back out of the plan to merge Evernorth, an XRP treasury stock whose core value proposition rests on XRP’s limited supply, onto public markets.
Source link
