Binance Freezes $4.2 Million From Chris Larsen Hack, But Exchange CEO Richard Teng Still Irks Ripple With ''Ambiguous'' Tweet

Binance Freezes $4.2 Million From Chris Larsen Hack, But Exchange CEO Richard Teng Still Irks Ripple With ”Ambiguous” Tweet

BySteven Walgenbach

Updated: 02 February 2024

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Binance froze $4.2 million worth of XRP from the $112 million hack on Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s personal wallet, but a tweeted comment from Binance CEO Richard Teng seems to have annoyed the Ripple team.

Teng said in a Feb. 1 X post that the exchange froze the $4.2 million worth of XRP stolen by the exploiter after Binance found “out early on about the exploit that occurred at Ripple.”

“This tweet is a bit ambiguous,” replied Thomas Silkjær, the head of analytics and compliance at the XRP Ledger Foundation. “The compromised accounts are personal accounts of @chrislarsensf – not an exploit at @Ripple.”

Ripple Exec Gives Insights Into The Hack

And while Teng praised @zachxbt for doing “a great job” in spotting the hack, Silkjær was less impressed.

“The initial investigation was done by @XRPLF and initiated as it was happening – not carelessly published on social media the day after like @zachxbt,” he said

It appears @Ripple was hacked for ~213M XRP ($112.5M)

Source address
rJNLz3A1qPKfWCtJLPhmMZAfBkutC2Qojm

So far the stolen funds have been laundered through MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, HitBTC, etc pic.twitter.com/HKGYsLQeMv

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 31, 2024

Initial speculation claimed that Ripple itself was hacked and the network’s XRP token was also compromised. This caused the price of the remittance token to plummet 5% in just an hour after ZachXBT’s post.

XRP Unable To Recover From Token Dump

Larsen tried to put the XRP community at ease by posting that the hack had nothing to do with Ripple itself. He explained that the stolen 213 million XRP were the result of someone gaining unauthorized access to his personal accounts.

Binance was one of multiple exchanges that the hacker sent the stolen funds to. Other platforms included Kraken, Gate.io, HTX, MEXC and HitBTC.

While Binance has frozen the XRP sent to its platform, exchanges like OKX and Kraken have yet to reveal whether they identified the hacker’s transfers or frozen any funds associated with the hack.