Ethereum mining pool Ethermine decides to distribute $2.6 million in transaction fees to miners

Etherchain, the owner of the Ethereum mining pool Ethermine, tweeted that it has decided to distribute the $2.6 million in transaction fees it received four days ago to miners.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, two transactions with a transaction fee of $2.6 million occurred on the Ethereum blockchain, processed by the mining pools SparkPool and Ethermine. After the transaction occurred, both mining pools issued messages asking the sender to contact them to avoid this being a mistake.

But apparently, Ethermine, which processed the second sky-high transaction, decided not to wait any longer. As for why it decided to allocate these transaction fees, the mining pool said, "Given the amount involved, we believe that four days is enough for the sender to contact us."

The mining pool further revealed that although someone contacted it claiming that they were the owner of the account, they were unable to provide a valid signature to conclusively prove that they were the real sender.

Ethereum core developers Vlad Zamfir and Péter Szilágyi criticized the decision, with Szilágyi saying: “Honestly, if you really want to pay back the money, you should wait another month or two.”

Etherchain said that if such an incident occurs again, it will automatically distribute the funds to the miners.

The transactions were initially thought to be a mistake by the sender or a problem with the wallet software they were using.

Larry Cermak, research director of crypto media The Block, said on Twitter that transactions with the same transaction fee from the same address are likely to come from a bug that has not yet been fixed. Emin Gün Sirer, associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, believes that the bug caused "the confusion of two fields in the API call", resulting in the user's transfer amount being set as the transaction fee.

However, blockchain analysis company PeckShield believes that this may be a GasPrice ransomware attack launched by hackers. Researchers said that hackers may have gained access to exchange funds and were able to transfer funds to certain whitelisted accounts. (Bitpush)