Chris Larsen’s XRP wallets were drained for $112M. GMEE lost $7M after token contracts were compromised via GitLab. Socket Protocol got hit for $3.4M due to unchecked input in its swap router. Wise Lending suffered a smaller but surgical $464K loss, price manipulation plus a rounding error sealed it. Four distinct exploits, one shared lesson: assumptions about input control are still getting people wrecked.
On January 30th, Chris Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple, was hacked for $112M. The attacker gained authorized access to several of Chris Larsen’s XRP accounts and drained 213M XRP tokens in eight transactions. Chris Larsen confirmed that the exploit was an isolated incident and assured Ripple wallets are secure. A portion of the stolen funds has been frozen since the exploit.
Exploit Contract (on XRP Ledger): rJNLz3A1qPKfWCtJLPhmMZAfBkutC2Qojm
Transaction Hash: BB2A66793F3562B5949BB911F744B39A29B41D8D6B61B20AC3A99E672A4839B6
On January 22nd, the GMEE exploit on the Polygon chain resulted in a $7M loss. The root cause of the exploit was unauthorized GitLab access to the token contracts. The attacker targeted the proprietary team token reserves and drained 500M GMEE tokens. GMEE acknowledged the incident and stated that the community-owned assets are secure.
Exploit Contract (on Polygon Chain): 0xcf32822ff397Ef82425153a9dcb726E5fF61DCA7
Transaction Hash: 0x9bf7dbf0b12136e257026e66d4c11791ace13ed6f23a8282245d67395b42b365
On January 16th, the Socket Protocol exploit on the Ethereum Mainnet resulted in a $3.4M loss. The root cause of the hack was the lack of input validation in the Socket Protocol’s WrappedTokenSwapperImpl contract. The performAction() function lacked input validation for the swapExtraData parameter. This flaw allowed the attacker to trigger the safeTransferFrom() function, leading to the unauthorized transfer of tokens to the attacker’s address. The incident impacted 712 users, and the Socket Protocol team temporarily suspended all transactions.
Exploit Contract: 0xCC5fDA5e3cA925bd0bb428C8b2669496eE43067e
Transaction Hash: 0x591d054a9db63f0976e533f447df482bed5f24d7429646570b2108a67e24ce54
On January 13th, the Wise Lending exploit on the Ethereum Mainnet resulted in a $464K loss. The root cause of the attack was a price manipulation vulnerability arising from the PLP-stETH-Dec2025 contract lacking liquidity. The attacker deposited funds into this nearly empty pool to artificially inflate the token price. Additionally, the attacker exploited a rounding error flaw in the withdrawExactAmount() function, withdrawing almost the entire pool except for 2 wei. However, the rounding error flaw caused the withdrawShares amount to be set to 0.
Exploit Contract: 0x37e49bf3749513A02FA535F0CbC383796E8107E4
Transaction Hash: 0x04e16a79ff928db2fa88619cdd045cdfc7979a61d836c9c9e585b3d6f6d8bc31