Developer’s Mistake? Someone Just Paid $450K (3,150 ETH) For Ethereum Transaction Fees

What could turn out to be the most expensive transaction fee spent for a cryptocurrency payment was spotted on the Ethereum network earlier today.

Four transactions which saw a transfer of roughly $19 or less than 0.15 ETH from a specific Ether wallet address were charged a whopping $454,500 in transaction fees on the Ethereum Network.

In the first transaction of the four, the user sent 0.01 Ether ($1.47) and paid a transaction fee of 210 ETH (approximately $30,850).

The next two transactions (first, second) saw twice that amount charged for transferring just $2.94 worth of Ether while the most outrageous was the 2100 ETH ($308.553) fee charged for only $14.69 or 0.1 ETH.

It is still unclear at this point which entity owns the Ether wallet that was heavily charged. However, the wallet has continued to see a lot of activity involving small transactions within the same range of the four heavily-charged transactions.

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.

Red Flag For The dApps

If that were to be the case, then it would be a timely reminder for other projects building dApps on the Ethereum blockchain to carry out proper checks before releasing their apps to the Mainnet.

Meanwhile, the latest development also casts some doubt on whether low budget projects should build on the Ethereum network or settle for other rival dApp platforms such as TRON.

Spending over $450K on apparently irreversible transaction fees would be a significant blow to these kinds of projects, and unless a compensation plan is set out, building elsewhere may be the only option to mitigate the risk.