The highest ever paid transaction fee on the Ethereum blockchain. Was it a genuine mistake or a bug?
An Ethereum blockchain user has mistakenly spent $5.2 million in transaction fees for just two small payments in the last 24 hours.
According to Decrypt, the user paid a fee worth $2.6 million just to send a meager amount of $130 of Ethereum. Another mistake happened where the user was transacting $86,000 but still paid the same $2.6 million fee. This makes up 2 million percent and is the highest amount ever paid in the name of the transaction fee for Ethereum.
The second transaction with a $2.6M fee happened ~2 hours ago. This is from the same address with the same exact fee in ETH (10,668.73185). This reinforces the theory of a bug and points to it not being fixed yet. https://t.co/ZHhwcqNvFJ pic.twitter.com/uAwkaPrTZG
— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) June 11, 2020
Possibilities behind such high transaction fees:
This could be the result of whatever is sending these txns (possibly an automated process) to incorrectly calculate the transaction fee (e.g., sending the Gwei amount instead of ETH)
an analyst told Colin Platt told Decrypt.
This means that the transactions are being sent in automatically but there is a technical fault in calculating the right amount of fee. Platt is of the viewpoint that the transactions are a result of some sort of exchange, such as a cold wallet. Furthermore, referring to the number of outgoing transactions from the wallet, he said;
You can see that it wouldn’t have been a hot wallet as the nonce was quite low
Opinions on this strange mistake:
Some people still think it was less of a mistake and more of a money laundering case because theoretically, an Ethereum miner could turn illegally held crypto into a “legitimate” miner income by paying a huge transaction fee and mining it themselves. As miners have the authority to choose what transactions they include in their own blocks.
But on the other hand, people who think it was an innocent blunder are of the opinion that since both transactions were sent to two diverse mining pools, which utilize a huge number of diggers around the globe to find new blocks, it could not be money laundering. Since there was not only one entity receiving all the funds, which could spread around many different miners so it doesn’t appear like it was an alleged mistake.
In either case of tax evasion or a mistake, the funds are preserved and mining pools are anticipating whether to return them back to the user or no.
