XRP News: Bitget Hacker Moves 54M XRP, Putting Fresh Selling Pressure

The attacker behind Bitget's $388 million news driver has moved 54 million stolen XRP out of three of the five wallets that originally held the funds. The redistribution raises the odds of future selling pressure on XRP.

Nearly 103 million XRP was taken from Bitget and split across five accounts when the exchange's wallet infrastructure was breached . What has changed since is not the size of the theft but its distribution, but coins that sat static for roughly a day are now spreading across new addresses.

So, what will happen ? This on-chain signature that typically precedes a liquidation attempt, though it does not confirm one has happened.

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Why Does This News Increase XRP Sell-Side Risk?

Balance as of Saturday

Unspecified of 103M total

Wallets 4 & 5 (combined)

Remaining of 103M total

~43 million XRP (implied)

Two wallets that each initially held 20 million XRP were reduced to 23 XRP and 55 XRP, respectively, by 12:41 UTC on Saturday. A third wallet, which had held a larger of the haul, was down to 5.8 million XRP after the same window. Roughly 49 million XRP, worth $75 million, remained across the original five accounts at this point.

XRP is hovering around $1.47 today, down 3% just over 24 hours, while still holding a weekly gain of 3%. The token has not cratered on the news, which is itself informative: markets are pricing in the transfer as a risk factor, not as confirmation of a dump.

Xrp (XRP)24h7d30d1yAll time

The original XRP haul was worth around $160 million, equivalent to 4% of XRP's reported $4.4 billion in daily trading volume. That comparison sounds reassuring on its surface, but reported volume is not executable order-book depth.

An exchange that receives flagged XRP can restrict the recipient account and block withdrawals once the deposit is identified. What it cannot do is freeze the coins while they remain in a wallet that the attacker still controls. This restriction only bites after the funds move onto a platform's books.

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Native XRP Can't Be Frozen in the Attacker's Wallet

XRP is the native currency of the XRP Ledger, and that status is the crux of the recovery news problem. The ledger's freeze function applies to tokens issued on top of it, not to XRP itself, which means Ripple has no built-in mechanism to stop the attacker from spending native XRP for as long as it sits in a wallet under their control.