Coins.ph Reportedly Loses $6 million Worth of XRP Due To Exploit

Coins.ph, the Philippines’ top crypto exchange by volume, is reported to have lost roughly 12.2 million XRP (Ripple) tokens to a recent exploit.

Data from XRP Scan reveals that the threat actor stole the tokens from Coins.ph before sending them out through OKX, WhiteBIT, OrbitBridge, SimpleSwap, ChangeNOW, and Fixed Float among others. However, not all of the transactions went through, thankfully, as WhiteBIT was able to block about 445,000 XRP tokens.

According to a spokesperson from WhiteBIT, their team has reached out to security firms Cristal and Chainalysis to flag the addresses connected to the stolen tokens. However, the exact details of the exploit are undergoing investigation, and are, at the time of writing, still missing.

Coins.ph is one of the leading crypto exchanges and wallet providers in the Philippines, having been established as early as 2014 and steadily rising to become the country’s top exchange. Among other things, the exchange also supports bills payments and money transfers for remittances, a prime sector in the country due to sizable number of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) who have provided for their families.

As of 2022 data released by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Philippine Central Bank), a record $36.1 billion in annualized volume for remittances. The statistic represents 8.9% of the country’s GDP and 8.4% of its GNI. This represents a highly lucrative market for non-traditional payment instruments such as crypto and digital assets, especially with stablecoins such as USDC or high-efficiency tokens such as Ripple’s XRP.

According to aggregated public on-chain data, Coins.ph currently has an average $2.5 million trading volume in the last 24 hours. It has recently partnered up with Circle, the issuer of the US dollar-pegged USDC to spread awareness among the Filipino public about USDC-pegged remittances as an alternative to traditional remittance channels.

Information security is important for just about any crypto exchange, project, or in general, but doubly so in a country such as the Philippines where there is potential for huge strides in crypto adoption and Web3. Coins.ph could take the lead in engaging the Filipino public about cryptocurrency and its advantages. The exchange recently partnered with UMA (Universal Money Address) to provide the wallet address naming standard, which uses Bitcoin Lightning protocols, the first integration of its kind in the country.

The firm, however, has not issued any statement on the matter of the alleged exploit, and no official press release has been published through its blog or social channels. XRP is currently trading at $0.55 on major exchanges.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.