An Ethereum wallet made the same costly error twice in 17 hours, pushing speculation that a software bug, not intentional misconduct, caused the mishap. The wallet struck again Thursday with a 10,668
An Ethereum wallet made the same costly error twice in 17 hours, pushing speculation that a software bug, not intentional misconduct, caused the mishap.
The wallet struck again Thursday with a 10,668.73185 ETH transaction fee ($2,635,603.52) on a transfer of just 350 ETH ($86,464.00). A similar error had hit the same wallet the day before, when it paid $2.6 million to process a $133 transaction. Both mining pools that received the fees froze them and asked the sender to identify themselves.
"This reinforces the theory of a bug and points to it not being fixed yet," tweeted Larry Cermak, Director of Research at The Block.
The first fee went to Spark Pool. The second went to Ethermine, a major mining pool processing a large share of Ethereum transactions. Both operators responded with the same message: contact us immediately if this was a mistake. Spark Pool and Ethermine each moved to hold the funds pending resolution.
Emin Gün Sirer, founder of AVA Labs, called the first incident a "goose egg transaction" and offered two possible explanations. One theory involved Miner Money Laundering, a technique he described in a 2016 blog post where fees could be converted to clean coins. The simpler answer, Sirer said, was "an honest mistake, a swap of two fields in an API call."
The second identical blunder suggested the simpler explanation held weight. Buggy wallet software might swap variables, sending massive values to the wrong place. A user might have copy-pasted code or modified parameters without testing, then repeated the mistake by sending another transaction before discovering the bug.
Ethermine responded to its pool's unexpected windfall: "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 sender should contact us immediately!"
The wallet's identity remains a mystery. Observers guessed an exchange owned it rather than an individual. It processes thousands of transactions per minute.
Whether the sender will come forward or additional errant fees will emerge from the same wallet remains uncertain. The mining pools are holding the windfalls pending the sender's response.
