XRPN shareholders voted unaware of XRP inflation bug

Before shareholders of Ripple and Arrington Capital's XRP treasury stock Evernorth Holdings decided last month on a proposal to take an XRP crypto treasury company public, they were not informed that the XRP supply could have been swollen by trillions of new tokens through hacking.

During the share redemption window that was open before September 28, no information was provided that a bug in the XRP Ledger’s base layer payment engine let hackers create trillions of new XRP tokens — each trading near $1.35 currently — for virtually nothing.

The bug rendered unenforceable on the network the fixed-supply promises made by many XRP proponents, such as Evernorth CEO Asheesh Birla’s assertion that 100 billion XRP was a cap that would never change.

“All 100 billion XRP tokens were created at the time of the XRP Ledger’s launch in 2012,” Evernorth’s proxy filing read. Actually, hackers could have produced orders of magnitude more during the past ten years.

Voting in an information vacuum about XRP

While validators have fixed the bug on the XRP Ledger, the fact that it existed during Evernorth’s shareholder redemption offer stands out.

Per the official account, an ethical researcher confidentially reported the flaw to Ripple’s development division on September 22, with XRPN shareholders and nearly everyone else unaware.

On September 25, Ripple deployed an urgent closed-source patch, describing it with vague references to “integer-arithmetic hardening.”

A September 28 deadline confronted shareholders for redeeming XRPN shares for cash or withdrawing from the merger of Evernorth — an XRP treasury stock whose core appeal depends on XRP’s capped supply — onto public markets.

Shareholders approved the move to Nasdaq on September 30, and the combination was completed on October 9.

It was only on October 9 that a formal report revealed what the September 25 “integer-arithmetic hardening” update had truly addressed: a severe inflation vulnerability that could have driven XRP’s price close to $0.

Luckily, the network avoided exploitation as no one took advantage of the flaw while it existed.

Nonetheless, XRPN shareholders committed to irreversible choices during that period.

XRPL Fixes Decade-Old Bug That Could Have Minted Trillions of XRP

RippleX and the XRP Ledger Foundation disclosed that a critical payment-engine overflow bug could have allowed an attacker to create spendable XRP beyond the network’s fixed supply using a specially crafted…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) October 11, 2026

‘That number will never change’

Birla, previously a Ripple executive and now CEO of XRPN, stated on the SPAC Insider podcast, according to a transcript Evernorth filed with the SEC, that “XRP is a pre-mined digital asset. One hundred billion XRP were created at inception, and that number will never change. A significant portion is held in escrow by Ripple.”

While that number has technically remained unchanged, it could have been altered had another researcher exploited the inflation flaw.

According to the official report, the vulnerability probably dated back to 2015.

On September 22, researcher Cayden Liao and Veria AI reported the “overflow” issue — a term for an inflation bug — via a bug bounty program.

RippleX and the XRP Ledger Foundation replicated the exploit, raised its severity level to critical, and paid the bounty.

The fix was released on September 25 as part of xrpld 3.4.1, without an amendment vote.

XRPN pitched XRP’s capped supply that almost wasn’t

The bug report says that one validated transaction using the exploit “could have created spendable XRP far beyond the total supply.”

Ripple Labs is an investor and a named counterparty in the business combination agreement that brought Evernorth public.

Evernorth's registration statement included generic language. It noted that the XRP Ledger's cryptography could “be flawed or ineffective,” according to the prospectus shareholders received.

No disclosure was made, while the XRPN redemption window was open before the September 30 vote, that the XRP supply cap was technically meaningless for much of the XRP Ledger's history.