On Monday was processed a $ 100,000 transaction by Tether for a fee of $ 23.6 million. Now the miner who received the fee returned the money.
After a very bad deal it in the end: lucky. Because, as the miner behaved in this case, he should not have behaved. What happened?
The highest All time transaction fee
On Monday, shortly after noon, the Bitfinex crypto exchange initiated a transaction that should make history. An amount of 100,000 tether sent from one of the Bitfinex main wallets should reach a wallet of the Defi-exchange Deversifi, which was spun off from Bitfinex two years ago. That succeeded – however, the miner who carried out the transaction was credited with 7,676 ethers, the equivalent of 23.6 million US dollars. The process made the rounds as the highest transaction fee ever.
The crypto exchanges involved, above all Deversifi, rushed to assure that customer funds were not at risk and that the incident would now be investigated quickly. Nobody has to be restless.
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In the course of the investigation, Deversifi quickly discovered that the error was probably a combination of problems with the EthereumJS JavaScript library and simultaneous changes in the transaction fees. In other words: The user who sent the transaction couldn’t help it – but neither could the miner.
In addition, the transferor must also have been a kind of edge case, because the In the end, a high fee was only possible because the wallet in question was able to pay for it due to its fill level. Any other user would simply have experienced a failed transaction. Deversifi explained the problem in a detailed blog post and – this is the most important thing – also fixed it.
The problem remained that the lost money had not been illegally credited to the executing miner. There was therefore no direct legal right to a return. After all, the miner had only accepted an offer and took action.
Binance will help you get in touch
Using an on-chain analysis, Deversifi was finally able to determine that the hitherto unknown miner repeatedly outsourced received ether to the Binance crypto exchange. Deversifi contacted Binance, Binance contacted the miner, the miner contacted Deversifi.
Deversifi was able to make an agreement with the miner. He should return 7,626 ethers and keep 50 ethers. According to the current status, this corresponds to around $ 140,000 and is undoubtedly a very decent fee for a transaction over $ 100,000.
The miner agreed and paid everything back except for the offered 50 ethers. At that moment, a giant stone must have fallen from the hearts of the operators of Deversifi. So they tweeted with relief:
The blockchain is immutable, but this revolution, in which we are all part of, is still carried by the values that make us human, it says. You can literally feel the relief. Although Deversifi now also has to cope with a considerable amount of damage, the disaster could be averted.
