Negligence when transferring cryptocurrencies, users are charged $ 2.5 million to transfer 133 USD

What’s more ridiculous when you want to send 133 USD to your friend but pay the transfer fee up to 2.5 million USD. That seemingly absurd thing turned out to be true when a cryptocurrency user paid that $ 2.5 million transfer fee for a remittance transaction in Ethereum – the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency. after Bitcoin.

This transaction is recorded on Etherscan – a tool to view and search ETH transactions on the market. According to this record, someone paid up to 10,668,73185 ETH (more than 10,000 ETH) to transfer 0.55 ETH from one wallet to another.

For the internet world that prefers conspiracy theories, many on Twitter think this is evidence of a new form of money laundering. However, there is a much simpler explanation for this: a mistake when transferring money.

Just like Bitcoin, in order to transfer money in Ethereum, users will have to pay a fee for their transactions to encourage miners to put their transactions into the next data block. The higher the fee, the higher the probability that the transaction will be put into the next data block – the faster it is done.

Normally, this fee is very low compared to the amount of money to transfer and the e-wallet computers will notify the trader of the fee to pay so that users do not have to pay too much.

However, in this case, it seems that the user has set a limit for “gas” (computing power for transactions), but the fee paid per gas is set too high: 0.5 ETH for every gas. The transaction used the entire 21,000 gas limit – the equivalent of a fee of 10,668 ETH, or about $ 2.5 million, to pay the miners.

In other words, a transfer of USD 133.95 requires payment of the transaction fee of up to USD 2.5 million.

While it is unknown whether this transaction was an accident or an accident, the exchange SparkPool received this fee to withhold this transaction for investigation. In 2019, SparkPool met a similar situation when the person making the transaction offered a fee of up to $ 300,000. SparkPool also kept this fee for investigation and then returned it to the wrong transferor, a blockchain firm in Korea.

Errors in transferring cryptocurrencies are not very rare today. However, rarely does it cause as much damage as it has just happened.

Refer to Motherboard