By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
The second $2.6 million Ethereum (ETH) transaction fee has provoked that questions on what is really happening and who is that user.
Two $2.6 million Ethereum (ETH) transactions have occurred within 24 hours. The unknown user paid a $2.6 million fee for an $87,000 worth Ethereum transaction. Earlier, the user paid the same $2.6 million for a $133 (0.55 ETH) transaction.
Ooft it happened again – another $2.6mil fee 🤪 pic.twitter.com/bh3mkdHLNu
— sassal.eth 🦇🔊 (@sassal0x) June 11, 2020
$2.6 million Ethreum Transaction Fee May Have Occured Because of Several Reasons
There may be several reasons that are responsible for why an Ethereum transaction with such a fee occurred twice. The first of them is that someone is trying to launder money. This could be a part of a series of transactions designed to cover the traces of illicit funds. Increasing transparency on the ownership of cryptocurrency wallets is causing problems for such transactions.
The second reason could be that there is a bug in the wallet software of the owner. This could be more likely as bugs are known to cause repetitive errors in blockchain transactions.
The third reason could be that this is a market-making transaction. Market makers (of the unethical kind) often use such tactics to drive Ethereum prices up for specific projects.
Most of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in the world today run off Ethereum blockchain. An increase in the Ethereum (ETH) prices could create gains for any single token or project in the DeFi circle. The transaction itself won’t work if the miners don’t cooperate. The second transaction was mined by Ethermine. The mining pool has called for the sender to contact it on its Twitter handle.
Today our Ethermine ETH pool mined a transaction with a ~10.000 ETH fee (https://t.co/B5gRWOrcPf). We believe that this was an accident and in order to resolve this issue the tx sender should contact us at via DM or our support portal at https://t.co/JgwX4tGYr4 immediately! pic.twitter.com/sWxVRx5muv
— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 11, 2020
This shows that the strong show of solidarity in the crypto space continues.
Despite irreversible transactions, cooperation between blockchain community members is possible. This undergirds the many aspersions cast by those who are decidedly “anti-crypto”. Sources also say that the miners of the first transaction also held a similar position as Ethermine.
Last year, Sparkpool also received a 2,100 ETH transaction fee. This was equivalent at the time to $300,000. The sender and the mining pool agreed to split the fee down the middle.
Human Mistakes on Blockchains Are Still Possible
Mistakes like this on blockchains are possible. They often occur as people are often prone to mistakes. Despite the tremendous advantages that blockchain technology has to offer, the humans that write the codes are still prone to mistakes.
The Ethereum 2.0 situation is one such example. Proposals and reviews to those proposals have been some of the issues that have kept the new version from coming to light.
Apart from scalability, the issues that surround the ERC-20 smart contracts have presented problems.
Migrating from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake might seem to be a bigger challenge than thought. One thing is certain: Vitalik Buterin and his team are leading the pack.