Crypto User Pays $3.1M Transaction Fee for 139 BTC Transfer

Bitcoin Transaction Fees Reach Record High

A Bitcoin user recently paid an exorbitant 83.7 Bitcoin (BTC), worth $3.1 million, in transaction fees for transferring 139.42 BTC. This is the eighth-highest transaction fee in the crypto’s 14-year history.

The BTC wallet address bc1qn3d…wekrnl tried transferring 139.42 BTC to bc1qyf…km36t4 on Nov. 23, but ended up paying more than half the actual value in fees. The destination address only received 55.77 BTC. Antpool, a crypto mining pool, captured the unusually high fee on block 818087.

Users on social media speculated that the sender may have selected the high transaction fee, but the replace-by-fee (RBF) node policy and the sender’s unawareness also appear to have played a part. RBF allows an unconfirmed transaction in the mempool to be replaced with a different transaction that pays a higher fee to get it cleared earlier. The mempool is a queue of all Bitcoin transactions waiting to be approved and added to the blockchain.

A mempool developer, mononaut, on X (formerly Twitter) suggested that the user behind the transfer probably wasn’t aware that RBF orders cannot be canceled. The user might have repeatedly replaced the fees in hopes of canceling it. The RBF history indicates that the last replacement increased the fee by another 20%, adding 12.54824636 BTC in fees.

Crypto Miners Accidentally Pay Abnormally High Transaction Fees

Crypto miners have recently made headlines due to an abnormally high transaction fee of $2.6 million that was paid for a single Bitcoin transaction. This is the largest fee ever paid in dollar terms, surpassing the $500,000 fee paid by Paxos in September. The largest fee in Bitcoin terms was paid in 2016 when someone accidentally sent 291 BTC in transaction fees.

Mononaut, a crypto expert, told Cointelegraph that this case of an accidental transaction fee has similarities to the Paxos case, but whether Antpool would return the funds would depend on their own payout policies and their obligations to share transaction fees with their miners.

Antpool has yet to comment on the issue, and has yet to respond to Cointelegraph’s requests for comments.