Mysterious transaction of the Etherum network pays a commission of 2.6 million dollars

Cryptocurrency transactions incur a fee for validation. Contrary to popular belief, transactions are first validated by miners and then queued to be added to a block. What's strange is a 0.55 Ether transaction with an associated fee of 10.688 Ether . No one has yet been able to explain this transaction within the Ethereum blockchain.

Normally the commission or fee of a transaction is usually very small. Typically the transactions that attract attention are those that move millions of dollars for just a few dollars. Transactions that move, for example, 5.000 BTC with a commission of less than 20.000sats are not rare, but this transaction on the Ethereum network draws attention.

What's behind the Ethereum network transaction?

Finding an explanation for this is really not easy. The truth is that it makes little sense to launch a transaction with such a high commission. The main reason is that it is impossible to know which miner will take the transaction and validate it. Quickly explained, all transactions are sent to a 'box' and the miners, as they are free, take the transactions in order of more to less commission. No one can assign a miner a transaction and it is impossible to know which miner will be free.

But the strangest part is that hours after the multimillion-dollar transaction, another similar transaction was made. This time, 350 Ether was moved with another fee of 10.668 Ether, for a total value of over $2.5 million. According to Emin Gün Sirer, a cryptocurrency expert and professor at Cornell University, the fields may have been swapped by mistake during the API call.

The theory that some have put forward about possible money laundering is technical nonsense. Basically, because we have already explained that it is impossible to know which miner will validate the transaction. Moreover, who gets the commission of the transaction is the validating miner, therefore, whoever validates the transaction becomes a billionaire by chance.

A validated transaction with withheld commission

Who has validated the transaction has been the Chinese mining group Spark Pool. As they have told Coindesk, they have frozen this commission pending the identity of the recipient. They have done it in case it is an error when making the transaction. Maybe someone wrote the transaction in Wei and forgot to correct the entered value.

Currently, the identities of the sender and recipient remain a mystery. Despite this, the flow of funds between sender and recipient has been traced. The recipient currently has no funds, as the 0.55 Ether received has been transferred to another Ethereum address containing approximately $36 million worth of Ether. Meanwhile, the sender's wallet holds $8.2 million after paying substantial fees.

Another strange aspect is that the issuer of the transaction has made other fund movements with commissions within the normal range. Everything suggests that it would be a bug or perhaps a human error when entering the transaction value (if it is entered manually, of course). This person could recover the commissions if he requests it from the Chinese miners and if they want to pay it back.

The curious thing is that last year Spark Pool received a commission of 2.100 Ether for validating a transaction. This is a much higher commission than usual, which is typically at most 0.001 Ether in Gas, at the highest rate. On that occasion, the mining pool returned 50% of the Ether commission to the transaction sender.