Bitfinex Pays $23 Million ETH Fee on $100,000 USDt Transfer

The transfer was made earlier today with eth fees currently standing at 58 gwei, or $3.7 for a simple transaction.

The gas limit for the Finex transaction is nearly 170,000, so a $100 fee might have been warranted for a timely confirmation.

Some noob intern however has clearly made a mistake somewhere and maybe has put the gwei amount same as the gas limit, so 160,000 gwei, or about 10,000x more than the usual base fee.

They thus just lost $23.5 million, which nowadays instead of going to miners, gets burned in eth.

So their mistake is everyone’s gain with eth currently at least $23.5 million more valuable because the Bitfinex noob has just burned that much of the supply.

Update: “DeversiFi is currently investigating the cause to determine how this occurred and will keep you updated. No customer funds on DeversiFi are at risk and this is an internal issue for DeversiFi to resolve. Operations are unaffected.”

Correction: It appears only a small amount was burned with the rest of the fee going to miners, making this mistake more curious.

Update: The miner has now returned the circa $23 million.