Midnight phone vibration, XRP ledger anomaly alert flashing—here we go again. But this time, the story is much more interesting than expected.

Having been involved in the crypto space for years, I’ve seen countless chain reactions triggered by small code bugs. The "automatic runaway" drama played out on the XRP ledger last night has become a textbook case: a major custodial service’s automation system, after draining the XRP balance of a related wallet, continued to wildly create new accounts. In just a few hours, nearly 11,000 invalid transaction requests were sent to the XRP network.

This isn’t a hacking incident. Frankly, it’s a complete automation script out of control.

**From Normal Process to Infinite Loop**

The story is simple. The custodian’s account creation script generates XRP wallets for users according to a set logic. The system originally ran quite stably. The problem lies in one step: the logic that checks the balance after it’s been drained.

The XRP ledger has a design mechanism—each new account must lock at least 20 XRP as a reserve, and each transaction destroys 0.0004 XRP. This is to prevent bad actors from creating大量垃圾账户 and overwhelming the network.

Theoretically, when the custodian’s XRP balance runs out, the script should stop working. But what actually happened? The system fell into a dead loop. It didn’t stop; instead, it kept sending high-frequency account creation requests.

This automated runaway event turned the "protective mechanism" itself into a source of pressure. It reminds everyone of a simple truth: no matter how smart the code, it must have corresponding circuit breakers and manual intervention mechanisms. Even a reliable major custodian, if its automation logic has gaps, could cause consequences that affect the entire blockchain.