After a four day wait, the Ethermine mining pool, in charge of verifying the abnormal multi-million transaction fees charged to send Ethereum last week, will distribute the funds to the miners. This follows the lack of response from the account holder who made the transaction.

According to a statement from Bitfly, the company behind the Ethmine pool, miners who were online at the time an unusual transaction took place, will receive the 10,668 ETH in tx fees paid (about $2.3 million at time of writing). After a five day wait and no response from the owners account, the transaction fee which was withheld by the exchange will now be distributed.

In the early morning of the London markets opening on Thursday of last week, a rather large transaction fee was noted by whale transfer aggregators leading to Bitfly suspending the distribution of the fees to miners yet. It was an abnormal fee that has never been witnessed before.

For a miniscule 350 ETH transaction from a whale account, the address paid close to $2.6 million in transaction fees at the time leaving the crypto world shocked. However, this was the second of such a transaction with China’s Spark Pool processing another abnormal ETH transaction – 0.55 ETH (~$140 USD) was sent for a $2.6 million transaction fee.

While no reports yet on what could have caused the wild variations in transaction fees, some analysts see this as a case of money laundering or extortion of some kind.

While the second transaction by Bitfly will take a totally different route as explained above, Spark Pool has locked the transfer fee from the miners and are looking for the best way forward on why such a transaction was made.

These two transaction fees break the record for the highest fees ever recorded on a blockchain by a long shot with a transaction fee of 236 ETH (~$130,000) paid in 2018 the previous record.

Well, a number of people have come forward to claim the transaction was made by them but there is still no valid transaction id sent by any of the respondents. The official Twitter statement from the Bitfly Company reads,

“While multiple people claimed being the sender of this transaction none of them was able to produce a valid signature of the sending account.”

The distribution of the funds to the miners will be made to the miners according to a “hashrate snapshot took at the time (block #10241999) mined by our Ethermine pool”.

While this was the first time such a large move has occurred, Bitfly states that they will no longer withhold any transaction fee pay outs to miners despite the size of the transaction as it is “advertised policy.” It reads,

“Also we would like to make clarify that in the future we will no longer interfere in the payout of large tx fees.”

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