A cross-chain bridge does exactly what it sounds like. It lets people lock tokens on one blockchain and get matching tokens on another. In this case, users locked XRP on the XRP Ledger and received equivalent tokens on Coreum's chain.
The bridge held about 200,000 XRP before the attack.
The drain started at 19:16 UTC and ended at 20:53 UTC, sending 94 outgoing payments to two newly created wallets. Each transfer needed approval from a group of relayers, and 17 of the 28 required signatures were used per payment.
The signing procedure was followed to the letter. The problem was what it was signing off on.
The bridge's verification logic never confirmed that a deposit payment had actually reached the bridge. Because the bridge never checked for an actual incoming deposit, the attacker could move money between their own accounts, label those moves as deposits, and collect real XRP payments. The relayers validated false evidence, and the system paid out as if everything was legitimate.
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No private keys were stolen. The XRP Ledger's core protocols were never touched or altered.
The first thing to understand is what this attack was not. It was not a hack of the XRP blockchain itself.
Coreum halted the bridge pending repairs. An official post-mortem, the detailed report of what went wrong, has not been released yet.
The market's reaction was noticeable but contained. On Aug. 11, XRP dipped to $0.99 before climbing back to roughly $1.01 at the time of reporting. That is a modest wobble, not a crash, which makes sense given that the flaw was in a bridge, not in XRP itself.
If you hold XRP, this is a story about risk, not about the coin being broken. The XRP Ledger kept working. The problem was in a tool built on top of it.
That distinction matters because bridges are where a lot of crypto attacks happen. They are complex, they move money between networks, and they rely on software checking itself. When that software misses a step, the results can be ugly fast.
This attack also shows how quickly things can go wrong. Ninety-seven minutes. That is the entire window between the first stolen payment and the last one. Two hundred thousand XRP gone before most people finished their morning coffee.
The good news is that the attack was contained to one bridge, and Coreum shut it down quickly. The longer-term takeaway is simpler: any system that moves your money is worth understanding, and even well-designed networks can have weak spots in the tools built around them.
For now, XRP is back above $1, and the bridge is offline for repairs. The question investors will be watching is what the post-mortem reveals about whether this kind of flaw can happen again.
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