The XRP Ledger Foundation said it has patched a critical vulnerability in a yet-to-be-enabled amendment to Ripple’s XRP Ledger, preventing what could have been a major exploit before deployment on mainnet.
The flaw, discovered on February 19 by security engineer Pranamya Keshkamat and an AI security bot developed by cybersecurity firm Cantina, involved a logic error in the ledger’s signature-validation code that could have allowed attackers to execute transactions without private keys.
“The amendment was in its voting phase and had not been activated on mainnet; no funds were at risk,”
Said the XRP Ledger Foundation.
According to the foundation, exploitation could have enabled unauthorised transfers, ledger state manipulation and broader ecosystem instability, warning that a large-scale attack might have severely damaged confidence in the network.
Cantina and Spearbit chief executive Hari Mulackal said:
“Our autonomous bug hunter, Apex, found this critical bug,”
Adding that:
“Had this been exploited, it would have been the largest security hack by dollar value in the world, with nearly $80 billion at direct risk.”
The vulnerability was identified through static analysis of the rippled codebase, after which validators were urged to vote against the amendment and an emergency release, rippled 3.1.1, was issued on February 23 to block activation.
The incident highlights the growing role of AI-driven security tools in blockchain development, coming days after Anthropic launched Claude Code Security, an automated vulnerability scanner it claims can reason like a skilled security researcher.
At the time of reporting, XRP price was $1.42.