In Brief:
- BitFinex sends 7676 Ethereum as gas fees to send a 100,000 USDT transaction.
- The matter is currently under investigation to determine how this occurred and will keep updated.
- The Miner who received The transaction fees, sends back 7385 Ethereum to BitFinex
A popular crypto exchange Bitfinex recently paid $23.7 million in transaction fees for sending $100,000 in Tether(USDT) to the layer-2 subsidiary platform DeversiFi.
According to Etherscan, Bitfinex paid a grand total of 7,676.6 ETH, which is currently around $23.6 million. It marks quite possibly the largest gas fee ever recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.
AT 11:10 UTC on the 27th of September, a deposit transaction was made using a hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface with an erroneously high gas fee.
To put the enormity of this fee into context consider the fact that the average transaction fee on the Ethereum blockchain at present stands at 0.013 ETH or $39.96.
Moreover, the matter is currently under investigation to determine how this occurred and will keep updated. All customers’ funds on DeversiFi remain protected. This is an internal matter that DeversiFi needs to resolve.
In response, Bitfinex tweeted that: “In transactions such as these, the fees are shouldered by third-party integrations with Bitfinex” suggesting that the exchange will not directly bear the burden of the fee.
At the time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his agreement with the human-error narrative, adding that: “I’m expecting EIP-1559 to greatly reduce the rate of things like this happening by reducing the need for users to try to set fees manually.”
With the EIP-1559 improvement, users are able to send the gas fee to the network directly. Then the network assigns tips to the miners. It lowers transaction fee volatility by burning the prices paid in ETH instead of paying miners. Still, somehow Bitfinex paid this much gas fee.
In a good-willed act of crypto kindness, the block miner who mistakenly fortuned from the transaction event has returned 7626 ETH to Bitfinex.
Later DeversiFi has published a technical post mortem to understand the cause.
