Popular cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex paid a whopping $23.7 million in gas fees for a very little $100K transaction, in what is assumed to be a technological error.
On September 27, the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex carried out a significant transaction by sending $100,000 worth of the Tether stablecoin to the layer-2 subsidiary platform DeversiFi. Unknown factors led to the exchange paying 7,626 ETH, or $23.7 million, which may have been the highest gas fee ever recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.
The deposit transaction was started at 11:10 UTC this morning from Bitfinex’s second-largest wallet to the wallet of DeversiFi via a second address, according to blockchain data from EtherScan. Even while DeversiFi advertises a service to eliminate petrol costs and hassle, saving you time and money with every trade or swap, the transaction came with an excessively high gas price.
To put the size of this cost into perspective, take into account the fact that the current average transaction fee on the Ethereum blockchain is 0.013 ETH, or $39.96. Additionally, two weeks ago, $2 billion worth of Bitcoin was transferred for a tiny price of $0.78 between unidentified wallets.
DeversiFi announced that they have started an investigation to find the most likely cause of the problem. They also stated that no client monies on DeversiFi are at risk and that this is an internal problem for DeversiFi to handle.
Three small to medium-sized transactions registered seismic costs in June 2020, with one 0.55 ETH transfer carrying $2.6 million in fees. This scenario numerically mirrored the Bitfinex case.
But once the final of the three transactions was identified as a malicious attack when the wallet owner contacted the mining pool that made the transaction possible, experts in the area started to speculate about extortion, fraud, and possibly money laundering. In this instance, 90% of the lost money was ultimately reimbursed to the owner.
The block miner who unintentionally profited from the transaction occurrence has graciously given back 7626 ETH to Bitfinex. DeversiFi also stated that a post-mortem analysis would be released soon.
