A bridge paid out real XRP against deposits that never happened

The Coreum-XRPL bridge lost about $200,000 after relayers treated memo data as proof of payment and approved withdrawals backed by no real deposit.

By The Third AnglePublished August 12, 2026 at 14:24 UTC3 min read

Ripple logo, used as an illustration for the XRP reserve drained from the bridge; Ripple and the XRP Ledger were not reported as compromised. Photo: Ripple / Wikimedia Commons · Public-domain text logo; trademark rights may apply

The flaw was in the bridge's verification logic, not the XRP Ledger protocol. Relayers checked memo data but did not verify that the stated destination had received a matching deposit. Seventeen of 28 signers then approved withdrawals from the reserve.

The reserve was real; the proof was not

The attacker completed 94 payouts before the bridge was halted. The operator filed a complaint with the FBI, but had not announced a recovery amount at publication time.

The incident is a bridge-accounting failure: the system signed a valid payout transaction without proving the economic event that should have authorized it. Any restart needs a fix that verifies the source transaction, destination and final settlement rather than trusting user-controlled metadata.

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