Arkham Intelligence in their recent tweet shared info about an Ethher miner who just lost all his mined Ether in one transaction. There are speculations in the crypto community about the reason for this transaction. Some believe it to be a deliberate act while some think it to be a mistake. Let’s explore the story and try to unwrap the cause.
Transaction with High Gas Fee
On Aug 11, a wallet 0x89A7……8ee88, sent out a transaction of 0.877 ETH ($2,396) and paid a transaction fee of 34.625 ETH ($93,494) to process it. The current transaction fee for a transaction on Ethereum blockchain is 11 Gwei that is almost $0.097. This transaction has caused buzz in the community as to why a person would do such a thing.
Looking at the transaction history of this wallet, it is clear that this wallet does not belong to a normal user but an old Ether miner. This wallet was connected to nanopool – an Ethereum mining pool. This wallet received its first Ether mining reward payment on December 9, 2017 and continued to mine till June 6, 2019. The user mined for approximately 544 days and collected 35.5 Ether.
What Could Be The Possible Reason
The Arkham intelligence, in their X post stated that this wallet holder has been mining ETH for 7 years, withdrew the ETH and burnt it accidentally.
The in-chain data from Etherscan shows this user was mining between Dec 09, 2017 and June 06, 2019 for a total of 544 days and not for 7 years as stated by Arkham. Analyzing the transaction where the wallet lost 34 ETH, it looks like funds were lost because of user’s carelessness. Almost every wallet that supports Ethereum blockchain gives the option to customize the transaction fee. This option is helpful to get your transaction approved on a priority basis. In this case, it looks like the person wanted to transfer 34.62 Eth to another account. Unknowing the wallet holder swapped the fields and lost all his Eth holding. This information was revealed by an X user, after which the Arkham Intelligence deleted their X post.
This is not the first case of losing crypto due to users’ mistakes..
Thousands of ETH Lost
On May 8th 2023, an Ethereum wallet named fadedface.eth sent out a transaction of 84 ETH to uniswap V2 to wrap the tokens. The user wanted to buy “Four token”. To prioritize this transaction the user sent a transaction fee of 64 ETH. That time Ether was trading at around $1850 making the transaction fee of around $118,400 (currently $166,121) and the value of ETH sent to uniswap around $155,400 ($217,991).
In another case, on Feb 19, 2019, an Ether mining wallet sent 2,730 Ether to Sparkpool in 3 transactions, to transfer 0.13 ETH to his wallet from the pool. On realizing his mistake he sent a message by blockchain to the pool offering to share half of the funds if they help him recover. The pool accepted the offer and returned him 1050 Ethereum.
The Big Question
These are only a few examples of mistakes that caused crypto users to lose a huge chunk of their holdings. There is no end to such cases. What could be the possible reason for such errors and mistakes? Experts believe the major reason behind it is the carelessness of the wallet holders. It is always advised to send out a little amount in a test transaction. This will eliminate such kinds of issues to a large extent. The other prominent reason is the inability of wallets to warn users when they edit the transaction fee. Whatever is the case, the obligation to check the details of a transaction lies upon the users, because it is their funds and they have to take responsibility for its security.
Also Read : USDT in Danger: The Impact of MiCA Regulations
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