Guy Pays $2.5 Million in Fees For One Ethereum Transaction, Hack or China Crackdown?

The biggest fee ever paid on ethereum has just been processed by the network with some 10,700 eth given in gas fees to SparkPool, a China based ethereum mining pool.

The person or entity wanted to move only 0.55 eth, currently worth just $130, with all this looking a bit suspicious.

The above is the address that sent it and the relevant transaction just about highlighted, with quite a few things standing out.

What jumps instantly is the frequency of transactions, almost every minute. That makes it obvious this is not an individual’s account, or at least not an ordinary one.

It’s not a smart contract. It could be a bot, with close to 6,000 transactions made. That usually leads one to suspect this is an exchange’s hot wallet, but it’s actually a pretty strange address.

It opened only recently, 6th of June, and somehow has amassed some 46,000 eth at the time of writing even after this 10k fee.

The options are endless as to what sort of address this is. It could well be some sort of dapp, but there’s no contract. So maybe an app?

It appears to be something that attracts deposits with it only receiving funding until recently, at least as far as we could go with etherscan saying we exceeded our limit.

So this is one of the early deposits we picked up, and again there are many speculations that can be made here including that it is just an ordinary person.

While the address where the 0.55 eth is withdrawn either belongs to Bithumb or is somehow connected to Bithumb.

What stands out about this address is the automated exit of funds to Bithumb the very moment they are deposited.

So either this is a Bithumb intermediary address, or a hacker address, or some sort of bot that insta deposits on Bithumb after receiving funds, with all of this pretty strange.

Normally when there’s such a huge fee you might think it’s a fat finger, but looking at the data that seems unlikley.

If we had to guess in context, then the relevant current events may be the ongoing crackdown of OTC traders in China.

The bank accounts of a lot of them have been closed recently, so the above may be related. Someone maybe made a mistake in the haste of things, or a bot malfunctioned, or it’s some sort of hack.

It could also of course be the Chinese government after seizing an OTC trader’s account, or the account of an OTC trader maybe has been hacked or a Localbitcoin like OTC trading site maybe has been seized.

Just what exactly has happened we don’t know, but the overall behavior of an OTC trader or facility can make sense, minus the 10k fee obviously, yet it could be something else.

As far as Sparkpool is concerned, a representative Qiu Xiaodong said that he has frozen the fees and negotiations. The pool is further researching the incident, and everyone is welcome to provide clues.

Updated to add Sparkpool comments, Copyrights Trustnodes.com