Jun 11, 2020
Two Days. Two ETH Transactions. $5.2 Million Paid in Fees
By Marko Vidrih on The Capital
Yesterday an unknown user of Ethereum paid a $2.6 million transaction fee to send ETH equivalent to $134. The second similar error occurred a few hours ago.
Yesterday, information appeared that one user made a transaction at 0.55 ETH, equivalent to $134, and paid a commission of 10,668.7 ETH for it — about $2.6 million at the current rate. The transaction has been confirmed by SparkPool, one of Ethereum’s largest mining pools.
The transaction fee was sent to SparkPool, from which miner rewards are distributed, and the pool confirmed on Twitter that it is studying the situation.
Vitalik Buterin commented it as a mistake.
The second similar error occurred a few hours ago. This time the user sent a large amount — 350 ETH, equivalent to approximately $86,000, however, the transaction fee again amounted to 10 668.7 ETH — $2.6 million.
“This may be the result of transactions being sent as part of an automated process and transaction fees are not calculated correctly,” said Colin Platt, an independent consultant.
Platt suggested that transactions are made by the exchange, possibly from a cold wallet.
“Apparently, this is not a hot wallet, because the transaction sequence number for the address was quite small,” he said.
Other analysts argue that this could be an action as part of a money-laundering strategy. Theoretically, an Ethereum miner can turn illegally obtained cryptocurrencies into the “legitimate” income of the miner by paying a huge fee for the transaction and confirming it yourself. This is possible because miners can choose which transactions they include in their blocks and can leave the transaction to themselves.
However, this seems unlikely in this case. One of the main arguments against money laundering — transactions fell into two different mining pools, which are used by thousands of miners around the world.
In both cases, ETH was frozen, and mining pools are considering whether to return the commission to the sender of the transaction.
“Today our Ethermine ETH pool mined a transaction with a ~10.000 ETH fee ... We believe that this was an accident and in order to resolve this issue the tx sender should contact us at via DM or our support portal immediately!,” wrote Bitfly, the owner of the Ethermine mining pool, which got the block with the second transaction.
The other day there was information that Upvest will develop a tool for predicting fees for transactions on the Ethereum network, and Glassnode reported that the daily volume of commissions of miners in Ethereum has become greater than in Bitcoin.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Featured image credit: Unsplash
