In the span of just four hours, five payments totaling 0.17 ETH were sent over the Ethereum network – along with more than $575k in transaction fees.

Eagle eyes keeping watch over the Ethereum network spotted several unusual transactions earlier today, all originating from the same ETH address and all occurring between the hours of 1 am and 5:15 am UTC.

eToro’s Mati Greenspan raised the hue and cry on Twitter this morning, just a few hours after the latest rogue transaction:

Ooooooooops! Looks like some poor dev just paid 3,150 ETH ($450k) in transaction fees.https://t.co/IAHU3ylY33https://t.co/6LEA3smeOJhttps://t.co/M0LztSyWo7 — Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) February 19, 2019

While Greenspan’s tweet noted three of the transactions, further review of the originating address’ transactions revealed two additional transactions, bringing the total to five.

What made these transactions so unusual wasn’t the amounts, which ranged from 0.01 to 0.1 ETH, but the associated transaction fees, which amounted to $575,992 based on Ethereum’s current value at press time.

The timeline of the mysterious transactions is as follows:

Block 7238273 @ 01:10:51 am UTC: 0.01 ETH ($1.44) + 210 ETH tx fee ($30,315.60)

Block 7238275 @ 01:11:30 am UTC: 0.02 ETH ($2.88) + 420 ETH tx fee ($60,534.60)

Block 7238290 @ 01:19:12 am UTC: 0.1 ETH ($14.45) + 2100 ETH tx fee ($303,345.00)

Block 7239021 @ 05:13:36 am UTC: 0.02 ETH ($2.88) + 420 ETH tx fee ($60,534.60)

Block 7239023 @ 05:14:14 am UTC: 0.02 ETH ($2.88) + 840 ETH tx fee ($121,262.40)

So which mining pool(s) got the extra cha-ching, you ask? According to Etherscan, Nanopool received the fees from the first, second, and fifth transactions, while Ethermine received the fee from the fourth transaction and Sparkpool hit the motherlode, mining the block that contained the third transaction with the 2100 ETH tx fee.

So What Actually Happened?

That, my friends, is the $575,000 question. There are plenty of theories making the rounds – everything from sloppy money laundering to an Illuminati-esque attempt by a mysterious whale to send a message due to the ‘significance’ of the transaction fee amounts involved.

Of course, developer error is a distinct – and some say the most likely – possibility as well. In pondering the possible reasons for the staggering transaction fees, crypto news outlet CryptoPotato notes:

Given the progression between the transaction fees and the times within the transaction, the best guess is that it could be an Ethereum developer who failed to carry out proper testing of the ETH decentralized application codes before allowing it to interact with the Mainnet.

Given that this isn’t the first time that a user has accidentally sent a transaction along with a disproportionately high fee, it begs the question of why hasn’t a protocol been put into place to prevent it from happening again in the future?

The mechanism already exists to reject transactions with transaction fees that are too low, so why can’t the reverse be implemented? When a user attempts to send a transaction, the node looks at the most recent 10, 20, whatever transactions on the network and if the user’s transaction fee is more than x% higher than the average, he or she would get an ‘are you sure you want to send a transaction fee of x?’ message in their wallet.

Those few extra seconds and the prompt to double check transaction fees could go a long way toward keeping accidents like this from happening.

What do you think was the cause of the insanely high transaction fees? Should measures be put in place to reject transactions with unusually high fees? Let us know in the comments below.

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