On May 23, 2019, someone, unfortunately, paid a transaction fee of 200.00360600 LTC on the Litecoin network. At the time of writing, the fee is worth around $17,536.

Somebody is definitely having a bad day. By some accident, a transaction fee of around 200 LTC was recorded on the Litecoin (LTC) blockchain.

The tragedy here is that the amount of LTC sent was 20x less than this fee. The user only sent 8.881 LTC (~$778) but spent over $17,000 on fees.

The transaction fee per kB was 83.2 LTC (~$7,297).

The fee per kWU was 20.8 LTC (~$1,824).

The fee per kVB was 83.23 LTC (~$7,297).

The mistake caused a spike in transaction fees across the entire network. Transaction fees ended up jumping to $0.70 — a level not seen since LTC was around $400 in December 2017. The fees settled back to normal levels by the end of the day, however.

Whale of a Mistake

The intention behind the transaction was likely to consolidate funds. The sender’s address first appeared on April 5, 2018, and has a total of 2,573 transactions made. In total, $211M worth of LTC has moved through it — with a final balance currently of 323 LTC (around $28,747).

Because the address commonly moves funds around, it is potentially owned by a business. It is unclear whether the crazy-high transaction fee was due to human error or a bot, but the miners are inevitably very happy about it.

A Chinese based mining pool called LTC.TOP received the fee. If it is feeling particularly kind, the mining pool could feasibly return the fee.

Check Your Litecoin Fees

The lesson here is this: if you are setting your own transaction fees manually, check your digits. Make sure the decimal is in the right place. It might even be smart for all LTC wallets to include reasonable limits on custom-set transaction fees — so that nobody can make this kind of mistake again.

Have you ever mistakenly sent a Litecoin (LTC) transaction with fees too high? Let us know your thoughts on this story below in the comments.