Ex-Ripple CTO Warns of Surge in Fake XRPL Airdrop Scams

On May 14 former Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz warned of a rise in fake airdrops and impersonation accounts targeting users on the XRP Ledger. The XRPL Foundation issued a similar alert and urged caution across community channels.

Scammers are creating cloned profiles that copy photos, display names and recent posts from known developers, executives and projects. These impersonation accounts prompt users to claim rewards, vote on proposals or connect a wallet to a third-party site. If a user signs the prompted transaction, funds can be transferred out and are typically unrecoverable on the public ledger.

Reported tactics include fake NFT rewards, spoofed airdrops linked by name to projects such as Flare and Firelight, and private messages from bots posing as community accounts. Campaigns emphasize urgency to push users to act before checking account details, transaction data or destination addresses.

Krippenreiter, an XRPL supporter who tracks incidents, noted that many prompts are framed as routine governance votes or token claims. In other cases victims approve transactions that swap XRP for worthless assets. Panos Mekras, co-founder of Anodos Finance, raised related concerns last year about vague token offerings and poorly defined projects using XRPL’s visibility to attract investors.

The rise in scam reports has coincided with increased network activity and institutional experiments on XRPL. Data from the digital asset treasury firm Evernorth show monthly transactions on the ledger rose about 65% over the past year, from 43 million to 71 million. Much of that programmatic volume is tied to participants such as the exchange Bitstamp, Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin, the tokenization platform Justoken and Brazil’s Braza Bank.

Traditional finance firms have also tested XRPL’s on-chain capabilities. JPMorgan, Ripple and Mastercard completed a cross-border redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury asset on XRPL that settled in under five seconds. Guggenheim issued short-term corporate debt on the ledger that generated more than $280 million in volume. The U.K. licensed exchange Archax is migrating institutional products to XRPL, including a £3.8 billion fund managed by abrdn and a plan to move $1 billion in traditional assets on chain by mid-2026.

Developers have rolled out protocol features aimed at compliance and privacy. The XRPL Foundation released software version 3.1.3 to streamline network upgrades. Earlier updates added Multi-Purpose Tokens with transfer limits and freeze controls. In early 2026 the network introduced Permissioned Domains, Token Escrows and Permissioned Decentralized Exchanges, and in April it launched a native zero-knowledge proof verifier to protect trade data on chain.

Market indicators show growing activity around XRP. CryptoQuant reported Binance XRP derivatives open interest at about $475.4 million with a 30-day Z-Score of 1.65. XRP spot ETFs recorded $25.8 million in inflows on May 11, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.36 billion. Blockchain analytics firm Santiment reported an all-time high of 332,230 wallets holding at least 10,000 XRP.

Security guidance for XRPL users remains consistent: verify account identities, inspect transaction details and destination addresses carefully, never enter a seed phrase into a website or app, and avoid connecting wallets to unsolicited links. The XRPL Foundation urged users to “avoid airdrops, giveaways, and fake customer support offers on X,” where impersonation campaigns often spread quickly around trending XRP topics.