Local tyrant transfer: transfer 0.5 ETH to pay 2.6 million USD handling fee, manual error or money laundering?
In the past two days, there have been two abnormal transfers in Ethereum: a giant whale paid more than 10,000 ETH transaction fees twice in a row, transferring 0.55 ETH and 350 ETH respectively. Due to the whale's "willful" operation, the average transaction fee of Ethereum soared to a record high overnight.
The first transaction occurred on the afternoon of the 10th. When the giant whale transferred 0.55 ETH, it did not choose a low-priced transaction fee. Instead, it paid a transaction fee tens of thousands of times higher than the transfer value—10688.73185 ETH, according to 249 Calculated in US dollars, the fee was worth US$2.6 million at the time.
The second transaction occurred at 11:30 am on the 11th, and the same address paid 10688.73185 ETH for the transfer of 320 ETH—the same amount as the day before yesterday.
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1. Where did the two transaction fees go?
According to Ethereum Explorer data, the recipients of both transfers previously had ETH balances close to zero. After two abnormal transfers, the giant whale still has 33,400 ETH in its address.
Regardless of whether the giant whale is due to a mistake or other motives, the handling fee has already been paid. Facing this "windfall", how will the miners react?
The person who packaged the first abnormal transfer was Xinghuo Mining Pool. The market leader of the mining pool said that the handling fee has been frozen, and they are waiting for the owner to contact them, and appealed to everyone to provide clues to find this mysterious trader.
The broadcaster of the second unusual transaction was the Ethermine mining pool. Bitfly, the maintainer of the mining pool, said: "The Ethermine mining pool packaged this transaction today. This is an accident. Please contact us from the sender of the transaction."
Perhaps out of the consideration of "fat fingers", both mining pools chose to "wait for the owner" at the same time. (Note: "Fat fingers" refer to erroneous transactions caused by keyboard input errors in financial markets such as securities and foreign exchange.)
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2. Why do you have to pay so much handling fee?
As the news of the mysterious transaction spread, many people in the currency circle began to speculate on the real reason behind this heaven-defying operation.
When the first transaction appeared, some people speculated that it might be a fat finger mistake: it was the giant whale who accidentally lost the transfer amount and handling fee, after all, this situation has happened before.
When the second operation of the same type appeared, the above speculations were all overturned, and people were more willing to believe that the giant whale did it intentionally.
Why do giant whales do this? Many prefer to believe that he is "money laundering"-money launderers send Ethereum transactions to their own nodes, and then miners use transaction fees to whitewash "dirty coins" to make them "clean" coins, Thereby achieving the purpose of money laundering.
Someone asked, "If it's really money laundering, there's no need to make such a big fuss, right?"
Alex, the founder of the data analysis company, pointed out that there may be a bug in the money laundering program, and the programmer has not noticed the error. The reason is that the sender used a gas price of 60 gwei in many previous transactions, and sent a transaction every few seconds. This seems to be an automated transaction program, which is obviously impossible for "fat fingers". The gas price of these two "large" transfers is 500 million gwei, which must be some kind of intervention in the wallet originally controlled by the program.
Regarding money laundering, netizen ECZEMA said: “The coins that have just been mined are the cleanest. If you have a transaction and don’t broadcast it, send it directly to the big computing power miners (collectors who collect black money) you are familiar with to seal the block. The money is on the transmission path. It will be clean."
At the same time, ECZEMA also pointed out, "Tracking down the same account, this kind of wrong high handling fee operation has been played many times." This has not yet been confirmed.
However, there are still objections that although the two transactions are from the same address, the blocks were mined by different miners, which reduces the possibility of money laundering or tax avoidance.
Ethereum founder V God also thinks this is a mistake, and said: "I expect the protocol upgrade to reduce users' attempts to manually set fees, so as to greatly reduce the probability of such situations happening."
