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

Ethereum • June 11, 2020, 3:50AM EDT

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.

About Author

Yogita Khatri is a senior reporter at The Block, covering all things crypto. As one of the earliest team members, Yogita has played a pivotal role in breaking numerous stories, exclusives and scoops. With nearly 3,000 articles under her belt, Yogita holds the records as The Block's most-published and most-read author of all time. Prior to joining The Block, Yogita worked at crypto publication CoinDesk and The Economic Times, where she wrote on personal finance. To contact her, email: [email protected]. For her latest work, follow her on X @Yogita_Khatri5.