Ethereum mystery deepens: The third transaction with a massive fee

Over the past few days, the second-largest crypto project by market cap, Ethereum (ETH), started seeing some rather unusual developments. Two different ETH transactions made by the same user returned came at a rather high cost, with $2.6 million (10,668.73 ETH) in fees per transaction.

While many have noticed abnormally large fees, no one had an explanation for it, and speculation quickly took place. Some spoke of a potential bug in Ethereum’s system, while others suspected a money-laundering scheme to be behind it all.

The third transaction takes place

Now, a third transaction took place, with a transaction fee sitting at 2.310 ETH, or around $540,000. The new transaction took place less than 24 hours since the second one, adding more than half a million to a total that already exceeded $5.2 million in fees alone.

However, the new transaction also brought in a new wave of speculation, with the community now suspecting that there might be more than one person involved.

This particular transaction differs in several ways from the first two. First, the fee was significantly lower this time, even though it is still quite massive. Next, this transaction volume was much higher than that of the first two, sitting at 3.211 ETH.

In addition to that, this amount was not sent from the same address as the ones before it, which means that a completely new address has entered the game. This transaction had “MiningPoolHub: Old Address 7” next to its name.

What is known about the new address?

Apart from this payment, the new address had plenty of smaller ones that went out to the same recipient, at pretty much the same time. But, all of these other transactions only had small amounts of few ETH, and their fees were between 0.0005 ETH and 0.29 ETH.

If this were a regular address, even fees of 0.29 ETH would be considered rather expensive. But, with the fee of $540k next to them, this amount pales in comparison.

Dovey Wan. the founding partner at Primitive Ventures, commented that this looks more like a message than an error.

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

This to me is NOT a bug, more like a MESSAGE. A whild guess us certain exchange/wallet/ETH services is being “kidnapped” by hacker (explain👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/gZSL7V5AoM

— Dovey "Rug the fiat" Wan (hiring) (@DoveyWan) June 12, 2020

Meanwhile, the receiving address had more than 2,000 transactions in total over the past 3 years. All of them only included small amounts of ETH, unlike the new one.

As for the outgoing transfers, the only ones that took place happened over 2 years ago, during the EOS ICO.