A bug? Another mysterious Ethereum transaction took place with $2.6 million in fees

Around 12:00 am ET Thursday, another high-fee, mysterious Ethereum transaction took place in which a sender sent $86,390 worth of ether (ETH) with transaction fees of around $2.6 million.

This is a transaction from the same sender who paid the same fees yesterday to send just $133 worth of ETH. Today’s transaction was mined by the Ethermine pool.

“We believe that this was an accident and in order to resolve this issue the tx sender should contact us...immediately,” tweeted Bitfly, the operator of Ethermine.

What’s going on? It's not clear, but Alex Manuskin, blockchain researcher at crypto wallet ZenGo, told The Block that it could be a bug and not a money-laundering scheme as some had suggested for the first transaction.

“A possible explanation could be a mix in the bot code between the sent value and the gas price,” said Manuskin. "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.”

The Block has reached out to Ethermine for further details and will update this story should we hear back.