Here’s Who Spammed Your XRP Wallet

Alloy Networks, a validator of XRP Ledger, and its “parallel chain” Xahau shared details of yet another memo spam attack initiated by an XRPL-based service. Tens of thousands of messages were sent to new on-chain wallets to promote one DeFi protocol — and this is not the worst.

30,000 spam messages for XRP wallets: Here’s what happened

On Nov. 10, 2023, over 30,000 messages were sent in the “Memos” field, which includes arbitrary messaging data with a transaction. As noticed by the team of Alloy Networks, this massive spam attack was likely initiated by Magnetic X (MAG), an ecosystem of DeFi services on XRPL.

Besides the huge pressure on the transactional mechanism of XRP Ledger, this attack damaged the entire blockchain as full history servers (archive RPC nodes) would have to store this data forever.

Thomas Silkjær, head of analytics and compliance at XRP Ledger Foundation, indicated two addresses involved in the attack and opined that the net number of messages sent might exceed 110,000:

~97K welcome messages from rNEWSizmnEsBAFxRT8xEUhC6bAk7T3ewK and ~20K from rXYShQybgRJD3LVnAYhRVNRMSKYgVnCyU

Representatives of XRPL Labs, a large XRP-oriented development studio, stressed that this activity looks like “pure waste” for the ledger, and they are receiving a ton of confusing feedback from owners of on-chain accounts.

As covered by U.Today previously, Magnetic X (MAG) has already initiated a number of memo spam attacks. This type of attack involves sending messages to all new accounts activated.

That time, the team of Magnetic X stated that the campaign was “educational.”

How to address memo spam on XRPL?

Members of the XRP community proposed various solutions to memo spam issues. Some of them opined that it would be solved by the Hooks amendment activation.

Other enthusiasts suggested imposing the lowest possible transaction fees for sending memo messages: one drop, which is a millionth of one XRP, could be charged for every character in the message.

Last but not least, the most radical critics of such a policy recommended Magnetic X (MAG) to run their own sidechain to stop wasting XRPL’s computational resources on shady campaigns.