A Bitcoin (BTC) user claimed they were a victim of having to pay an exorbitant amount in transaction fees. The fees amounted to $3 million, significantly eclipsing the previous world record fee of $500,000 set in September 2023. This situation has been difficult on the user which he discussed on his newly-created X (formerly Twitter) account.
An apparent accidental payment
Most people were baffled when the record fee was broken because it was six times the previous record. The crypto community’s doubts were confirmed when X user @83_5BTC claimed it was an accidental and excessive payment. This transaction was mined using the AntPool platform in block 818,087.
He wrote, ‘It was my BTC that paid the high fee. I created a new cold wallet, transferred 139BTC to it and it got transferred out to another wallet immediately. I can only imagine that someone was running a script on that wallet and that the script had a weird fee calculation’.
A fee worth 83.65 BTC
As referenced in his Twitter handle, the user lost 83.65 BTC, worth $3.13 million. This is a massive loss since 1 BTC is already worth around $38,157.80. That is extremely good value and the user lost it overnight with an apparent hack and not by crypto betting or investments.
The transaction was verified
Despite his claims of a hack, the transaction was verified by Mononaut, a pseudonymous developer behind a Bitcoin explorer called Mempool. The signature checked out, confirming that @83_5BTC had control of the key that paid the fee.
Mononaut was not the only one who confirmed the transaction because Casa co-founder and CTO Jameson Lopp also verified the signature.
The potential of a high-level hack
This verification raises concerns about a potential hack that may be involved here. This would’ve involved a high-level hacker since this operation would take some technical savvy to do. If @83_5BTC did not do this, the hacker signed off on the transaction.
This is a similar situation to what happened with the previous record of $500,000 when it was deemed as an overpayment by crypto provider Paxos. F2Pool who was the miner facilitating that transaction reimbursed Paxos.
The user will be given a refund
Mining provider AntPool did not comment at first but recent updates have shown they are offering to refund @83_5BTC for the record-breaking fee. To help deal with similar issues, Mononaut detailed that a low-entropy wallet might’ve been the reason behind the issue. That meant the wallet had insufficient randomness to protect the account from hacks, finding alternatives might be the key to avoiding this moving forward.
He also noted that further security measures should be taken over crypto wallets and transactions like this. Mononaut said, ‘Let this be a reminder not to take shortcuts with your entropy, and ideally to use multisig for very large sums’.
Having more protective layers will pay off a great deal for anyone, especially users who have plenty of cryptocurrencies in their wallets. They could use it for crypto betting to have a safer avenue and not rely on trades that can get affected like this. X user @83_5BTC got lucky with AntPool’s willingness to help but other cases might not be as fortunate.
