One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges made a costly mistake. A $100,000 Tether transfer was met with the highest transaction fee ever.
Mistakes can be very expensive
As DeversiFy reported on its Twitter feed, “on September 27, a deposit transaction was made using a hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface. It was charged an erroneously high gas fee.”
The transaction in question was made on the Ethereum network. Its purpose was to transfer Tether in the amount of $100,000 USDT. The funds were to go from Bitfinex to DeversiFy.
As Etherescan reports, Bitfinex paid 7676.6 ETH for the execution of the order, which was approximately $23.6 million at the time. This fee thus became the highest ever. Since the transfer was running on IP-1559, an additional 0.05 ETH was burned during its execution.
DeversiFy is in the process of investigating the reasons behind such incident. However, it points out that the users’ funds are fully safe. The incident also has no impact on the exchange’s operations.
Miner refunds most of the fees
As we learn from the DeversiFy profile, the very next day the exchange received information that the miner decided to return most of the transaction fee that was paid. Out of 7676.6 ETH, 7626 ETH was returned to the owners. This means that the miner kept more than 50 Ether for himself.
Transaction fees don’t have to be high at all
Although the Ethereum network is struggling with transaction costs, they are not as high as the current situation presents. The execution of the above order was most likely influenced by the human factor. Some market participants believed that the problem of fees would be solved with the EIP-1559 update, which was part of the London hard fork in August. This was obviously a wrong assumption, as manifested by the current transfer fees, which have remained at similar levels on the Ethereum network for quite some time. Currently, making a token exchange on Uniswap, based on the Ethereum blockchain, already costs more than $70. Operations on smart contracts, on the other hand, are even more expensive.
In comparison, the situation on Bitcoin is much better. The recent transfer in the area of the largest cryptocurrency, worth USD 2 billion, is loud. The commission here was barely 0.00001713 BTC, or about $0.72.
