‘Whale’ Simply Despatched $130 in Cryptocurrency With a $2.6M Transaction Price

UPDATE (12:29 UTC): Spark Pool says it has frozen the payout to miners in its pool.

Slip of the finger? Sadist? It’s not but recognized. However at simply earlier than 10:00 UTC Wednesday, an unknown pockets holder despatched 0.55 ether (round $133) with a 10,666 ETH transaction price – at the moment price just below $2.6 million.

The price went to Chinese language mining group Spark Pool, which processed the transaction and should distribute the hundreds of thousands to its members. A standard transaction price would doubtless be as much as $0.50 or so, however may be manually set increased by a sender in the event that they need to push a transaction by way of extra rapidly.

The identities of each the sender and receiver will not be but recognized. However the sender has an ETH pockets steadiness price greater than $11 million – even after spending $2.6 million in transaction charges. As compared, the receiver’s pockets is now empty, with previous funds transferred out to different wallets.

Surprisingly, the sender’s pockets has been sending out transactions each minute in current hours and with connected charges price lower than a greenback. As such, it’s attainable the whale unintentionally reversed the figures for this odd transaction.

This isn’t the primary time Spark Pool has been on the receiving finish of a transaction price windfall.

Final yr, the corporate froze a mysterious 2,100 ETH fee (then price $300,000) it made for mining only one block – 600 instances the typical block reward on the time. After monitoring down the sender, a South Korean blockchain agency, Spark Pool agreed to separate the reward 50/50.

Relating to this newest transaction, Spark Pool spokesperson advised CoinDesk it was following up and welcomed any potential leads concerning the identification of the sender simply “in case it was despatched by mistake.”