XRP drops below $1 for the first time in nearly two years

XRP briefly fell below $1 on August 11, a price level the token hasn’t touched since January 2024. For a coin that was trading at $3.65 as recently as July 2025, that’s a long way down in a short amount of time.

What happened to the Coreum bridge

On August 9, a flaw in the deposit verification logic of Coreum’s XRPL bridge allowed an attacker to drain 199,916.3 XRP in just 97 minutes. The bridge’s relayer software incorrectly validated fake or self-payments as legitimate deposits.

Before the attack, the bridge account held approximately 200,410 XRP. After those 97 minutes, the balance sat at roughly 493.5 XRP. The bridge’s operators halted operations immediately once the scope of the damage became clear.

Critically, the flaw lived in Coreum’s bridge software, not in the XRP Ledger itself. The underlying protocol was not compromised.

By August 10 and 11, XRP was trading in the $1.00 to $1.01 range, down from the $1.02 to $1.03 band it had held earlier in the week.

Cross-chain bridges: crypto’s recurring weak point

What makes this case notable is the speed. Nearly 200,000 XRP gone in under an hour and a half suggests the attacker either had deep knowledge of the bridge’s logic or found a flaw that was straightforward enough to exploit quickly. The relayer verification bug, which allowed the system to accept payments that were either fabricated or looped back to the sender, is the kind of input-validation error that security audits are supposed to catch before deployment.

XRP’s longer arc and what the $1 level means

The token spent most of the period between 2020 and 2023 below $1, weighed down by the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple Labs alleging that XRP sales constituted unregistered securities offerings. The token’s climb back above $1 in early 2024 was read by many holders as a signal of rehabilitation.

Ripple the company was not involved in the Coreum bridge exploit and faces no direct exposure from the incident. The XRP Ledger itself functioned exactly as designed throughout.

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