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Show Summary

A bug that sat in the XRP Ledger’s payment engine for about 10 years could have minted 18 trillion XRP out of nothing, against a fixed supply of 100 billion. Jeff and Chip break down how it worked, who found it, why the fix skipped the usual validator vote, and why it lands right as Evernorth’s XRPN is expected to open on the Nasdaq Monday.

  • How the exploit worked: hundreds of tiny offers, one payment that fills them all, and a total that rolls over into XRP that never existed.
  • An AI agent from Veria found it on September 22. RippleX shipped the patch 3 days later, got validators upgraded before disclosure, and says there is no evidence it was ever used.
  • The $250,000 bounty: Chip and Daniel Keller say saving the chain was worth at least one more zero, and a newcomer named Justin gets a lesson from the XRP Army.
  • AI guardrails cut both ways: frontier models that won’t pen test your own code, open-weight models that will, and why security is never finished.
  • Evernorth closes its SPAC with about 473 million XRP and $300 million in cash, while Bitcoin, Ether and Solana ETFs bleed through October.
  • Also in the back half: James Carville’s meltdown, Bessent’s letter to Elizabeth Warren, Europe’s migration and military service push, and the UK digital ID fight.

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