Someone just paid 2,100 ETH to send 0.1 ETH …

Cowboy coding gone wrong, impatient Money Launders or something else?

Photo by Andrew Worley on Unsplash

There have been four weird transactions in the last 24 hours. All from the same address with transaction fees that are extremely high to send a small amount of Ether. This begs the question, is someone having a really, really, bad day or is something else going on.One possibility is that the account is trying to launder stolen Ethereum via the miners. If this was the case you would want to be absolutely certain that you were the miner to get the block reward. Normally transactions get put into a pool for the miners to try to put into blocks.

Let’s say a money launder was trying to launder crypto using the transaction fees. To be clear this isn’t me, I wouldn’t do that. I would use crypto gambling sites that make use of an internal ledger and have weak security 😉 but I’m not, just so we are clear …. 😉

Our criminal wouldn’t want the other miners to have a chance to collect the fee. So, they just wouldn’t release the transaction into the transaction pool. They would keep trying to create a valid block with their unreleased transaction.

It’s not a requirement for every miner to have seen a transaction before it is written into a block. This keeps the network fast. It also means I can keep redoing the work with their secret transaction until I get a successful block.

If this is money laundering it failed at being inconspicuous. Small amounts over a larger number of transactions would have been better. That could also have drawn attention though. Three mining pools benefited from the unusual fees, so it’s most likely something else.

transaction 1 (420 ETH) — etherscan link for transaction 0xcb59748b9b7b9732f04b66dde0009a1e4856a50ed8ff68a0dedbaa5e57807d31

transaction 2 (210 ETH) — etherscan link

transaction 3 (2,100 ETH) — etherscan link

transaction 4 (420 ETH) — etherscan link

The miners did make bank on the transaction fees — 2,100 ETH (SparkPool), 420 ETH (Nanopool), 420 ETH (Ethermine) and 210 ETH (Nanopool).

It’s interesting that they are multiples of 210 (10x, 2x, 2x and 1x).

A normal transaction has a Gas price of 0.000,000,01 Ether (10 Gwei). A transaction uses 21,000 gas, which gives a transaction fee of 0.000,21 ETH.

1 Gwei = 1,000,000,000 Wei.

So if you though you had specified the gas price in Wei (smallest unit of ETH) instead of Gwei you would be paying 210,000 ETH for your transaction instead of 0.00021

Maybe someone didn’t understand the units, or mixed the transaction fee with the amount. It seems unlikely given the wallet has 17,712 transactions though. Based on the volume of transactions it could be owned by an exchange.

Perhaps a cowboy coder was making changes while drunk on production?

Looking at the recent transactions out it doesn’t seem like an exchange though.

The frequency of transactions of the recipient addresses could indicate being part of a tumbler network.

Whatever the case it’s super weird.

The pseudo anonymous nature of Ethereum means there is no bank we can ask what happened. Or if it was a mistake, to reverse the transaction.

If I had to guess, my money would be on a software bug, maybe an environment variable error that used Gwei instead of Wei.

*update*