Ripple Co-Founder Chris Larsen Reports Personal XRP Accounts Hacked

Ripple Co-founder and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen said Wednesday (Jan. 31) that some of his personal XRP accounts were hacked on Tuesday (Jan. 30).

He said this in a post on X in response to a post speculating that the Ripple network might have been hacked, CoinDesk reported Wednesday.

“Yesterday, there was unauthorized access to a few of my personal XRP accounts (not @Ripple) — we were quickly able to catch the problem and notify exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved,” Larsen said in his Wednesday post.

Larsen’s post came in response to a post by ZachXBT, identified by CoinDesk as a “blockchain analyst,” the report said.

“It appears @Ripple was hacked for ~213M XRP ($112.5M),” the ZachXBT post said.

Ripple, a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network created by Ripple Labs, has launched several new offerings in recent months.

In December, the firm updated its crypto-enabled cross-border payments solution. The newly enhanced Ripple Payments, formerly known as RippleNet, enables businesses to leverage the blockchain easily for faster, cheaper and more efficient cross-border payments.

In November, Ripple partnered with Onafriq to boost the speed and efficiency of payments between Africa and several new markets. With this partnership, Onafriq is using Ripple Payments to open three new payments corridors, enabling customers of PayAngel in the United Kingdom, Pyypl in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Zazi Transfer in Australia to make remittance and business payments to recipients in 27 countries on Onafriq’s pan-African network.

In October, Ripple partnered with Web3 financial platform Uphold to support and improve Ripple’s cross-border payments infrastructure.

These moves come at a time when crypto and blockchain technology are driving both change and real business value across the way that the world moves, manages and tokenizes value, Brooks Entwistle, senior vice president of global customer success and managing director at Ripple, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in September.

“Big banks and financial institutions are much more interested today than they certainly were five or six years ago, when we rolled out some products for the first time,” Entwistle said.