A Second Strange Ethereum Transaction With a $2.6M Gas Fee Baffles Experts

A second mysterious Ethereum transaction paying $2.6 million in gas fees has been sent by the same user, leading to speculation over whether the account belongs to a malfunctioning trading bot. 

According to Etherscan, the transaction was sent around 03:30 UTC on June 11, and it involved the transfer of 350 ether for a jaw-dropping 10,668.73 ETH (~$2.6 million) fee. 

This highly unusual transaction marks the second time in as many days that this user has paid the same crazy gas fee to send Ether (in the first transaction, which took place on June 10, $133 worth of Ether was sent).

Giving the similarity between the transactions, some are speculating that the user may have mistakenly swapped the fee with the amount to send: 

Yet another “goose egg” transaction, this time on Ethereum. Someone paid $2.5m USD in transaction fees, to send $133. They almost certainly swapped the fee with the amount to send.https://t.co/3Vp8iHTgGP

— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) June 10, 2020

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted that the transaction was “definitely a mistake,” and that the underlying error would be addressed in EIP 1559:

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.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 10, 2020

ZenGo blockchain researcher Alex Manuskin believes that the account could belong to a trading bot and that the transaction fee was an error in the bot’s code:

He told The Block:

“A possible explanation could be a mix in the bot code between the sent value and the gas price. This sender used to send a transaction every 1 minute or so, so this did not look like a human operator. Might be some sort of a trading bot, for some exchange, repeating the same operation.”

Ethermine ETH pool operator Bitfly published a tweet on June 11 clarifying the transaction and asking for the sender to contact them in order to receive a refund:

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

Ethereum mining pool SparkPool similarly froze the June 10 transaction and claimed to be waiting for contact from the sender before proceeding with a solution. 

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