Another ETH transaction charges millions in fees

Cryptocurrency transactions are known for their low fees. This is one of the main reasons why people are using them for transferring major amounts of money. However, recently, Ethereum (ETH) transactions started charging massive fees for transactions that transfer much lower amounts of money.

This has led many to suspect that Ethereum might be bugged, although no one is sure what kind of a flaw is responsible.

Ethereum charges millions in fees

The most recent example of Ethereum messing up user's transactions with major fees happened earlier today. Around 12:00 AM ET, an ETH transaction that can be described as nothing short of mysterious took place.

An unknown sender attempted to send $86.390 in ETH coins, but their transaction fee ended up being around $2.6 million. Interestingly enough, this transaction came from the same sender who sent $133 in ETH yesterday.

This earlier transaction also fetched a major fee in millions of dollars. The new transaction that took place at 12 AM was mined by the Ethermine pool.

Ethermine's operator, Bitfly, commented on the event via their Twitter account. Bitfly stated: “We believe that this was an accident and in order to resolve this issue the tx sender should contact us...immediately.”

What is going on with Ethereum?

As mentioned, nobody seems to know what is going on with Ethereum. There is no evidence of a bug, but the same trader has made two transactions, and they both brought extremely large fees which are bigger than transactions themselves.

For now, it is unclear what is going on, although blockchain researchers, such as ZenGo wallet's Alex Manuskin, believe that a bug is a fair possibility.

Some other suggestions include a money-laundering scheme, especially when the first transaction took place. However, Manuskin believes that this is not the case. He said that there is a possibility of a mix in the bot code between the gas price and sent value.

The sender sent a transaction every minute or so, which indicates that this likely wasn't a human operator, but rather a trading bot for an exchange, which was repeating operations.