Honest miner pays million fee back – keeps 140,000
On Monday, a $ 100,000 transaction was processed by Tether for a fee of $ 23.6 million. Now the miner who received the fee returned the money.
After a really bad deal, in the end it means: lucky. Because, as the miner behaved in this case, he should not have behaved. What happened?
On Monday, shortly after noon, the Bitfinex crypto exchange initiated a transaction that should make history. An amount of 100,000 tether sent from one of the Bitfinex main wallets should reach a wallet of the Defi-exchange Deversifi, which was spun off from Bitfinex two years ago. That succeeded – but the miner who carried out the transaction was credited with 7,676 ethers, the equivalent of 23.6 million US dollars. The process made the rounds as the highest transaction fee ever.
The crypto exchanges involved, above all Deversifi, rushed to assure that customer funds were not at risk and that the incident would now be investigated quickly. Nobody needs to be restless.
In the course of the investigation, Deversifi quickly discovered that the error was probably a combination of problems with the EthereumJS JavaScript library and simultaneous changes to the transaction fees. In other words: The user who sent the transaction couldn’t help it – but neither could the miner.
In addition, the transferor must also have been a kind of edge case, because the high fee was ultimately only possible because the wallet in question was able to pay it due to its fill level. Any other user would have simply experienced a failed transaction. Deversifi has the problem in a detailed blog post explained and – this is the most important thing – also resolved.
The problem remained that the lost money had not been illegally credited to the executing miner. There was therefore no direct legal right to a return. After all, the miner had only accepted an offer and took action.
By means of on-chain analysis, Deversifi was finally able to determine that the hitherto unknown miner repeatedly outsourced received ether to the Binance crypto exchange. Deversifi contacted Binance, Binance contacted the miner, the miner contacted Deversifi.
Deversifi was able to reach an agreement with the miner. He should return 7,626 ethers and keep 50 ethers. As things stand, that’s around $ 140,000 and is undoubtedly a very decent fee for a $ 100,000 transaction.
The miner agreed and paid everything back except for the offered 50 ethers. At that moment a giant stone must have fallen from the hearts of the operators of Deversifi. So they tweeted with relief:
The blockchain is immutable, but this revolution, in which we are all part of, is still carried by the values that make us human, it says. You can literally feel the relief. Although Deversifi now also has to cope with a considerable amount of damage, the disaster could be averted.
