The price of XRP (XRP-USD) dropped 7.72% over the past five days following a major software scare. An AI security system found a ten-year-old math bug in the XRP network. This flaw could have let an attacker create 18.45 trillion fake tokens out of nowhere, an amount 184.5 times larger than the network limit of 100 billion XRP coins.
The discovery forces the cryptocurrency community to face a new reality, which is that AI tools are now capable of finding complex software bugs faster than human auditors.
The threat caused alarm among market participants because an attack could have devastated the value of XRP, which holds a market capitalization of roughly $94 billion. XRP currently trades around $1.39 as of October 11, 2026.
How the AI Found the XRPL Bug
The bug stayed hidden in the XRP Ledger payment system since 2016. It was a math counting error that happened when adding up trade totals on the network market.
A thief could bundle together hundreds of fake, high-value trade offers. This math glitch broke the system’s count and reset the total price to a tiny sum. As a result, a buyer paid almost nothing, while the sellers got huge batches of brand-new, fake XRP. Even the built-in guard meant to stop fake token creation failed due to this exact same counting error.
Veria AI, an artificial intelligence security system built by Veria Labs, found the flaw and submitted a bug report on September 22, 2026. The AI system identified the problem and proved it worked on a local test network.
RippleX engineers confirmed the issue and raised its status to “critical,” noting that the fake XRP could be freely spent or sent to crypto exchanges if the attack happened on the live network.
XRP Ledger Developers Rush to Establish an Emergency Software Patch
The danger was so big that the XRP Ledger development team skipped their usual steps.
On September 25, the group put out a fast software fix called xrpld 3.4.1. They completely skipped the normal two-week community vote. They also put out the fix without showing the code right away, which upset users who want all network software kept open to the public.
Following the fix, RippleX confirmed that no one exploited the bug on the live public network and no funds were stolen. The source code for the 3.4.1 patch is now published.
Veria Labs Received a $250,000 Bounty for Identifying the Flaw
This event stirs up a bigger fight over smart tools and online safety.
Avalanche maker Emin Gün Sirer warned that smart software will spot core code bugs in crypto tools long before it cracks basic math locks. RippleX tech worker Mayukha Vadari agreed that these new tools change how safety works. “Things have changed with AI. You can’t just sneak in a critical bug patch in a regular public release process, because you’re going to get caught and reverse engineered right away,” Vadari posted on X.
For identifying the flaw, Veria Labs received a $250,000 bounty, the maximum reward offered by the XRPL bug bounty program.
Worries over code flaws hurt investor trust across the XRP network. XRP’s price fell 7.72% over five days to $1.3924, down 0.66% on the day. The drop cut into XRP’s total market value of roughly $94 billion.
