The four ledgers each have a different backstop for their issuance limits. XRP’s total supply is capped at 100 billion, backed by an invariant that prevents coins from appearing out of thin air; Bitcoin’s 21 million cap is hard-coded into the consensus-layer halving formula, with a cut every four years set by the protocol; Ethereum has no fixed cap, and its annual issuance rate is adjusted through community governance; Solana’s inflation rate is also a voting parameter, gradually moving toward 1.5% year by year. What separates the four is what backs their caps, and who spots a problem first.
The part that failed this time was XRP’s invariant. When the payment engine sums open offers on the embedded platform, it uses a 64-bit counter; the “XRPNotCreated” invariant, added in 2017, was tied to that same 64-bit counter. When the counter overflowed, both the preceding sum and the subsequent invariant failed together. On September 25, RippleX released the emergency xrpld 3.4.1 patch, bypassing the “80% of validators, two-week vote” process for the first time since the mechanism was implemented.
Tracing this invariant back, I found that it shares a 64-bit counter with the logic responsible for summing open offers. The patch merely widened the counter from 64 bits to 128; it did not split them into two separate counters. The overflow has been blocked, but the counter backing the supply cap and the business-logic sum are still tied together. If it happens again in another form, it may not end so quietly.
The cost of the failure was actually low. Reproducing it cost only a few hundred XRP, and no public record of coins being minted has emerged. There’s a second item this time, too: the fixBatchV1_2 batch-processing amendment activates on October 9. The emergency patch bypassed the usual vote, separating security response from decentralized governance: the fast decision is made by the team; the slower one is the validators’ vote.
This failure was in the backstop, not the cap itself—the cap only says that no more can be issued, but the counter backing it and the business-logic sum share the same place. What leaked was never a single number; it was the counter. If another ledger with an independent counter later develops a similar overflow, or if XRP’s supply deviates from its 100-billion cap, I’ll have to scrap this assessment and start over. If neither happens, I’ll leave it as it stands for now. To track this counter along XRP’s daily chart, Binance’s side makes it clear: the daily readings are laid out in the spot section, and you can verify them by tracing back through the fix. This article records an opinion and does not constitute investment advice. $ZEC
$LUMIA
$ERA
#xrp账本修复可增发xrp的漏洞
The part that failed this time was XRP’s invariant. When the payment engine sums open offers on the embedded platform, it uses a 64-bit counter; the “XRPNotCreated” invariant, added in 2017, was tied to that same 64-bit counter. When the counter overflowed, both the preceding sum and the subsequent invariant failed together. On September 25, RippleX released the emergency xrpld 3.4.1 patch, bypassing the “80% of validators, two-week vote” process for the first time since the mechanism was implemented.
Tracing this invariant back, I found that it shares a 64-bit counter with the logic responsible for summing open offers. The patch merely widened the counter from 64 bits to 128; it did not split them into two separate counters. The overflow has been blocked, but the counter backing the supply cap and the business-logic sum are still tied together. If it happens again in another form, it may not end so quietly.
The cost of the failure was actually low. Reproducing it cost only a few hundred XRP, and no public record of coins being minted has emerged. There’s a second item this time, too: the fixBatchV1_2 batch-processing amendment activates on October 9. The emergency patch bypassed the usual vote, separating security response from decentralized governance: the fast decision is made by the team; the slower one is the validators’ vote.
This failure was in the backstop, not the cap itself—the cap only says that no more can be issued, but the counter backing it and the business-logic sum share the same place. What leaked was never a single number; it was the counter. If another ledger with an independent counter later develops a similar overflow, or if XRP’s supply deviates from its 100-billion cap, I’ll have to scrap this assessment and start over. If neither happens, I’ll leave it as it stands for now. To track this counter along XRP’s daily chart, Binance’s side makes it clear: the daily readings are laid out in the spot section, and you can verify them by tracing back through the fix. This article records an opinion and does not constitute investment advice. $ZEC
$LUMIA
$ERA
#xrp账本修复可增发xrp的漏洞