In less than 24 hours, the Ethereum network confirms two transactions with a combined gas fee of $5.2 million.
In the first transaction, which was confirmed on June 10 at 9:47 am (UTC), 0.55 Ether valued around $135 was sent for a transactions fee of over 10,668 Ether (worth around $2.6 million) while hours later in the second one, the same sender sent 350 Ether, paying exactly the same gas fee.
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When many in the crypto community are seeing it as an error, some are speculating some suspicious behavior.
SparkPool, the Ethereum mining pool which added the first transaction on the blockchain, has already frozen the $2.5 million in transaction fees associated with a mysterious transaction. They are now waiting for the sender to reach out to them to find a solution.
The second transaction was approved by Ethermine pool. Ethermine is operated by Bitfly which believes that the transaction was approved as an “accident” and requested the sender to contact them.
Today our Ethermine ETH pool mined a transaction with a ~10.000 ETH fee (https://t.co/B5gRWOrcPf). 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 at https://t.co/JgwX4tGYr4 immediately! pic.twitter.com/sWxVRx5muv
— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 11, 2020
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A bug or deliberate?
Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, also believes that the abnormal fee was charged by a mistake and assured that such errors will be reduced with a protocol upgrade.
“Definitely a mistake. I’m expecting EIP 1559 to greatly reduce the rate of things like this happening by reducing the need for users to try to set fees manually,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, some crypto users are pointing out that the transactions were not broadcasted in the usual manner.
Transaction wasn’t broadcast in the fashion that proper ethereum transactions are. The individual is attempting to “clean” his ETH by reclaiming the fee later elsewhere
— John Bones (@JohnNejamin) June 11, 2020