XRP Ledger's new proposal blocks the flash loan attacks costing DeFi hundreds of millions
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★ Tier-1 Source
The two biggest DeFi exploits of the past two months have one thing in common.
Key facts
- Thorchain lost roughly $10.8 million on May 15 to a cross-chain attack that drained funds across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, and Base
- Cross-chain bridges have lost over $2.8 billion to attacks since 2021, per Chainalysis
- A draft amendment filed on the XRPL standards repository earlier this week, proposing concentrated liquidity and StableSwap-style pools for the chain's native automated market maker, included
- What that means is that XRPL transactions either fully succeed or fully fail, like an Ethereum transaction
Summary
Recent DeFi exploits on protocols like Thorchain, Drift and KelpDAO have relied on flash loans, a mechanism that does not exist on the XRP Ledger. Because XRPL transactions are atomic and cannot include composable intra-transaction calls, flash loan attacks are structurally impossible on the network. As XRPL pursues AMM upgrades and its tokenized real-world asset volume grows, institutional investors may weigh this built-in exploit resistance against Ethereum’s deeper liquidity and more mature DeFi ecosystem. Thorchain lost roughly $10.8 million on May 15 to a cross-chain attack that drained funds across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, and Base.