Sketchy Ethereum Transaction: Users Sends 3200 ETH, Pays $500K Fee

A new sketchy Ethereum transaction occurred yesterday when a single, unmarked address that was unknown to the crypto public, sent two transactions with a few of 10,668 ETH in a 16-hour span. In our latest Ethereum news, we find out more about the transaction.

The first transaction cost $2.5 million and sent only $130 of value while the other one cost $2.5 million and sent $87,000 worth of ethereum. The transactions were flagged as likely mistakes which were likely caused by a bug in the wallet software that was used by the transaction sender. While this story quickly reached the crypto public, another address made the same error and paid an extremely high fee which was much higher than the status quo. This time, some analysts explained that the sketchy ethereum transaction could be related to a hack. 24 hours after the second fee transaction, block explorers, and individuals noticed another transaction that was suspicious: one user spent more than $500,000 to send 3200 ETH worth $750,000.

 

One of the founding partners at Primitive Ventures Dovey Wan, who is a notable crypto commentator, remarked in reference to the blockchain data of the transaction:

 “WOW another abnormal ETH transaction with over 2K ETH fee just emerged, following the previous two incidences each with over 10K ETH fee.”

This is the latest incident second incident screenshot, Block height 10247265

The addresses changed from previous an exchange hotwallet like to “MiningPoolHub”

🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/vL71MYWLjV

— Dovey 以德服人 Wan 🪐🦖 (@DoveyWan) June 12, 2020

The address that sent the latest transaction had nothing to do with the single address that sent the last two transactions. According to Wan, there is a good chance that the address related to this transaction was hacked:

 “A wild guess [is that] a certain exchange/wallet/Ethereum services is being “kidnapped” by a hacker… The hacker can move the coins but only to a list of certain addresses which are whitelisted (or other unknown constraints), hence by [wasting the assets they can pressure the] exchange to settle with a ransom.’’

This is quite a different stance than the previous two suspicious transactions which were deemed by the community to be caused by a bug. As Larry Cermak explained:

 “This is from the same address with the same exact fee in ETH (10,668.73185). This reinforces the theory of a bug and points to it not being fixed yet.”

The associate professor of computer science at Cornell University Emin Gun Sirer explained that the bug was likely swapped the intended transaction amount with the transaction fee resulting in a 10,668 ETH fee instead of the 10,668 ETH transaction. Although these transactions are only outlines, the highlight one of the main issues that Ethereum has over the past few weeks which is, of course, high fees.