Last week's ETH monster fees to be distributed to miners

Last week, Ethereum attracted quite a bit of attention after three different transactions that took place on June 10th and 11th returned massive multi-million fees. At first, the entire crypto industry suspected this to be a result of a bug, but it quickly became apparent that the enormous transaction fees were what the sender intended to pay.

Now, StarkPool and Ethermine announced that the $5 million collected in fees will be distributed to the project’s miners.

Ethereum’s mysterious transactions

The three transactions in question were significantly smaller than their own fees. The first one involved 10,668.73 ETH in fees, while the amount sent was only 0.55 ETH.

The second transaction sent 350 ETH, while the fees were equally as large as the ones paid during the first one.

Lastly, the third transaction confused the community the most. The reason for this is the fact that it came from a different address. It sent 3,221 ETH, but the sender opted to pay 2.310 ETH in fees.

The first two transactions came from the same address, and they were mined by StarkPool and Ethermine. Both attempted to reach out to the unknown sender via social media, assuming that the fees were paid by mistake.

It has been almost a week since the first transaction, but the sender has not yet decided to respond. Unable to reach out to the sender, both mining pools decided to distribute the fees to the miners.

While multiple people claimed being the sender of this transaction none of them was able to produce a valid signature of the sending account.

The distribution will be done according to a miner hashrate snapshot we took at the time block 10241999 was mined by our Ethermine pool.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

To be responsible for both miners of SparkPool and the transaction sender, we decided to distribute the proceeds seven days after the transaction was mined, aka 15:30 June 17th (GMT+8).

— SparkPool (@sparkpool_eth) June 16, 2020

In addition to this, Ethermine also stated that they will no longer interfere with any future transactions that may come with such massive payouts.

A new theory: Is it all part of a blackmail scheme?

Interestingly enough, there is still no definitive conclusion of what actually happened. The community believed the transactions to be a mistake, while some assumed they were a money-laundering scheme.

Now, one explanation also claims that they came as a consequence of an exchange wallet hack. The theory claims that hackers can’t withdraw the money to just any address. Instead, they had to use specific ones that are whitelisted.

In turn, they opted to send small amounts of ETH and pay massive fees, in order to demand ransom, or simply to keep emptying ETH accounts.

So the million-dollar txfees *may* actually be blackmail.

The theory: hackers captured partial access to exchange key; they can't withdraw but can send no-effect txs with any gasprice. So they threaten to "burn" all funds via txfees unless compensated.https://t.co/kEDFGp4gsQ

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 12, 2020