The name of a bitcoin owner who paid $ 500,000 for just one cryptocurrency transaction has been revealed

Paxos has admitted that it was behind a bitcoin transaction for which a huge fee of 20 BTC (about $ 510,000) was accidentally paid.

In an email to Decrypt, a Paxos spokesperson confirmed that on September 10, the company overpaid this fee for a transfer of 0.074 bitcoins, equivalent to $ 200. The error has already been corrected and was limited to the company’s internal transactions. The representative explained that the incident only affected Paxos' corporate activities — customers and end users were not affected, and all their funds are safe.

The unusually high fee attracted the attention of blockchain analysts. Some believe that the error could have been caused by a software bug, while others see the payment of 20 BTC as a big gift for miners who receive commissions as compensation for maintaining network security. Transactions with higher fees are processed faster by miners, but the average fee ranges from $ 1 to $ 3.

Some analysts have suggested that the payment company PayPal may have been behind the transaction. The address that carried out the transaction matches the behavior of an inactive wallet that is marked on the OXT blockchain as belonging to PayPal. The guess was close to the truth: PayPal uses Paxos to store cryptocurrencies on behalf of its customers.

Paxos is currently negotiating with the mining pool to refund the overpaid amount. The transaction fee went to the F2Pool mining pool, which mined the block containing this transaction. F2Pool administrator Chun Wang said that the 20 bitcoins would be reserved for three days in case the sender wanted them back. If the sender does not request their funds back during this period, they will be paid to the miners.

It should be noted that large fees for transferring small amounts are quite rare. Back in 2021, a user of the eEthereum blockchain who tried to buy Strips tokens on the MISO platform paid a $ 430,000 fee for a failed transaction.