Bitcoin Miner Antpool Offers To Reimburse Affected User The Enormous $3 Million Transaction Fee

Cryptocurrency mining pool Antpool has said it will refund a record $3 million transaction fee mistakenly paid for a single transaction last week, once the affected user provides the necessary identification information.

In a Nov.30 announcement, AntPool indicated that its risk control system “temporarily froze the fee when packaging the transaction,” and requested the user to verify their identity before December 10.

Antpool asked the owner of the funds to prepare a signing tool, either Electrum or Bitcoin Core, and use the private key of the address that sent the transaction to sign an on-chain message with the code “AntPool” before sending the signed text to the miner’s support email address.  

Record $3 Million Transaction Fee 

On November 23, a Bitcoin user intending to send 139.42 BTC (then valued at roughly $5.1 million), was charged a transaction fee of 83.64 BTC ($3.1 million) — setting a new record in USD terms for a single BTC transaction. The recipient address received just 55.77 BTC, worth around $2 million.

A Bitcoin user came forward and claimed to be the victim of the outrageous $3 million transaction fee, noting that it was their wallet that paid the fee and that a hack had hit them.

“I created a new cold wallet, transferred 139 BTC to it and it got transferred out to another wallet immediately,” the user “83_5BTC” said on X (formerly Twitter). “I can only imagine that someone was running a script on that wallet and that the script had a weird fee calculation. 55 BTC gone forever. 83.5 BTC to be decided.”

Antpool has yet to verify the victim’s identity.

Nonetheless, BTC transaction fees have skyrocketed this month amid the re-emergence of Bitcoin-linked non-fungible tokens (NFT), known as Ordinals.

Hardly The First Bitcoiner To Overpay Transaction Fees

A similar scenario was witnessed in September when stablecoin issuer Paxos revealed it paid $500,000 in transaction fees to move 2,000 worth of BTC. F2Pool, the miner facilitating that transaction, ultimately refunded Paxos the overpayment.

It’s worth mentioning that miners have no obligation to refund fees after someone has fat-fingered a Bitcoin transaction, but may decide to do so when the amounts involved are outsized.

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