Transaction fees on the cryptocurrency network are often fluctuating as they are used to prioritize confirmations from miners, but when one Ethereum transaction ticket had a fee of $2.6 million attached to it, the validator must have jumped at the chance.
In sending only $130 worth of Ethereum, someone appears to have mistakenly paid $2.6 million in fees. This equates to a $2 million percent fee charge in regards to the amount of ETH sent.
The ability to input an amount for the fee in order to push up a transaction in regards to priority may have caught the user unaware as perhaps a few too many zeros were added.
Big money
The transaction included a transfer of 0.55 Ethereum to an address on cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, while 10,668 Ethereum was also added as a fee to the miners. The transaction was mined by SparkPool, one of the largest Ethereum mining pools currently.
The anonymous nature of payments in cryptocurrency and their transactions means it is uncertain as to who made this potential mistake, and it has led to SparkPool has opened up their channels for people to “provide clues.”
“We are further investigating the incident of unusually high tx fee, and you are welcome to provide clues to support@sparkpool.com. SparkPool has had the experience of handling similar issues properly. There will be a solution in the end,” the mining pool tweeted.
The $2.6 million transaction fee has since been sent to SparkPool’s Ethereum address where it distributes funds to its wide array of miners. The mining fee hasn’t been handed out yet, however.
Reasons for the high fee?
There are a number of reasons that can be looked at as to why this high fee occurred, chief among these is of course a simple mistake. It could have even been a mistake in filling out the field as sending $2.6 million worth of ETH for a fee of $130 is far more likely.
Alex Svanevik, founder of data science DAO D5, told Decrypt, “Given the distribution of gas prices set by this wallet (every single outgoing transaction has a gas price of 60 gwei except this one), I’d say this must have been some manual intervention on an otherwise programmatically controlled wallet.”
