Ethereum transaction fees have reached the highest level at $2,631,127 following a single transaction in which $2.5 million was paid as fees. According to Glassnode, this far exceeds anything ever recorded as transaction fees on the network.
The transaction with a hash 0xca8f8c315c8b6c48cee0675677b786d1babe726773829a588efa500b71cbdb65 was mined on the 10237208th block, roughly 4 hours and 16 minutes ago.
These kinds of incidents have been reported on the Ethereum network before now, although nothing compared to the latest one. As we reported, Fees paid to miners recently exceeded the uncle reward paid to miners in March 2020.
This is unusually huge as Ethereum transaction fees are known to be far cheaper than Bitcoin’s. Although fees are determined by how congested the network is at any time, a transaction should not cost more than a few cents under normal circumstances.
A mistake?
At the time of reporting, the Ethereum team hasn’t made any official comment on the issue. However, some respondents on Twitter believe it might be an error of some kind. This Twitter user says it could be a programming error in which the fee field was swapped with the sending amount.
Meanwhile, Ethereum daily network fees surpassed that of Bitcoin on the 6th and 7th of June. Data from Glassnode showed the total Ethereum fees on the 6th was $498,000 while that of Bitcoin was $308,000.
On the 7th, the fee total was $540,000 and $258,000 for Ethereum and Bitcoin respectively. Although network activity on Ethereum spiked around the time while the Bitcoin network has been quite lax, it may not be enough to cause the huge increase in fees recorded in this single transaction.
Sadly, transactions on the blockchain are irreversible, which means the fee is gone for good. As at the time of reporting, the transaction has gone through 788 block confirmations.
