The miner of a block that carried a huge amount of Ethereum paid incorrectly as a transaction fee, has made the decision to return nearly all of the funds.
Leading blockchain explorer, Etherscan, shows that the address connected to the transactions sent Bitfinex ETH 7,385 in one transaction and ETH 241 in two other transactions. This makes a total of ETH 7,626 which is valued at $22m per the current ETH price.
Yesterday, it was reported that crypto giant Bitfinex has paid $23.5m in transaction fees for a transfer of around $100,000 in tether, via the Ethereum network. This would suggest that the miner kept ETH 50.
Non-custodial exchange DeversiFi was also involved in the transaction. The company has since confirmed the information but has reassured customers that their funds are not at risk. On Tuesday, DeversiFi released a Tweet that thanked the miner for returning the incorrectly paid ETH and stated that a post-mortem report will soon be available.
The Chief Technology Officer of Bitfiniex, Paolo Ardoino, also made a statement saying, “Kudos to the miner for being proactive and fair. And thanks to Binance for helping in establishing the contact. Funds have been sent back to the source address.”Ardoino also reassured the trading community that “No user will be affected whatsoever.”
Why did the error occur?
Many in the crypto community are holding discussions around whether they too would have returned the funds and if so, how much they would decide to keep for themselves. The identity of the mysterious miner is not yet known however, many fellow miners are respectful of his decision to return the ETH and not simply bag $22m for himself.
The transaction was processed in block 13307440 and the miner could have easily refused to return the fees since the event was not due to hacking. By making the decision to return, the miner has gained the trust of the crypto community.
Bitifnex has identified the transaction as a “fat-finger error.” One spokesperson said that “In transactions such as these, the fees are shouldered by third-party integrations with Bitfinex. DeversiFi has also confirmed this in their recent statement. We look forward to DeversiFi’s investigation and to their having this matter sorted on their side.”
Since the error, the crypto community have been debating over whether burning transaction fees is a good idea. The Avalanche exchange network is a blockchain network that burns all transaction fees. Had the error been made on this blockchain, the miner would have failed to return any of the mistaken fees at all.
Direct of Research at The Block, Larry Cermack, put out a reassuring Tweet stating that, “For those that are making this mistake – not all fees on Ethereum are burnt. Only 0.0001% of the $24M fee was burnt so about $25.”
