A crypto exchange accidentally paid a $24 million fee for a $100,000 ethereum transaction

Crypto exchange Bitfinex paid USD 23.5m (ETH 7,676.61) in transaction fees for a transfer of close to USD 100,000 in tether (USDT) via the Ethereum (ETH) network, according to public transaction data on Etherscan.

The transfer was made at 11:10 UTC on Monday and appears to have been sent from a wallet controlled by Bitfinex to a wallet belonging to DeversiFi, a non-custodial exchange spun off from Bitfinex in 2019.

“In transactions such as these, the fees are shouldered by third-party integrations with Bitfinex. This has also been confirmed by DeversiFi in their recent statement. We look forward to DeversiFi’s investigation and to their having this matter sorted on their side,” a spokesperson for Bitfinex

DeversiFi confirmed that “a deposit transaction was made using a hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface with an erroneously high gas fee.” Per the company, they are “investigating the cause to determine how this occurred […],” while adding that no customer funds are at risk.

Judging from transaction data on Etherscan, the USDT transfer was made using the new EIP-1559 standard, which – among other things – is intended to improve the estimation of transaction fees on the network.

The transaction was made with what is possibly the largest transaction fee ever to be paid in crypto. Other incidents in the past include a USD 5.3m transaction fee paid on Ethereum by the small Korean P2P exchange Good Cycle.