Miner Returns $2.2 Million In Fees Mistakenly Paid by Crypto Exchange Bitfinex

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex paid a whopping $23.57 million in transaction fees to deposit $100,000 in what appears to be a bug in the system. The exchange was actually moving the amount in stablecoin Tether (USDT) to the decentralized exchange DeversiFi, which shared the mishap on Twitter. DeversiFi is a non-custodial exchange that was spun out of Bitfinex in 2019, which offers access to DeFi protocols “without paying gas fees.” “At 11:10 UTC on the 27th September, a deposit transaction was made using a hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface with an erroneously high gas fee,” tweeted DeversiFi. The DEX noted that it is investigating the cause as to how this occurred and assured that no customer funds on the platform were a risk. “This is an internal issue for DeversiFi to resolve. Operations are unaffected,” it added. Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, had also assured that no user will be affected by this and that in the worst-case scenario, the exchange will take care of it from the company's funds. But since then, the situation has been resolved, and DeversiFi noted that the miner of block 13307440 had returned 7626 ETH that was incorrectly paid as a transaction fee. “The blockchain is immutable. But the revolution we are part of is defined by our values as humans,” it said. “Funds have been sent back to the source address,” Ardoino also confirmed.