Ethereum pools distribute $2.6M transaction fee

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Ethermine Pool and SparkPool, the Ethereum block reward transaction processors that mined an ETH transaction worth $84,000 with a $2.6 million transaction fee attached to it on June 10 and June 11, have decided to distribute that multi-million dollar transaction fee among its miners. 

To be responsible for both miners of SparkPool and the transaction sender, we decided to distribute the proceeds seven days after the transaction was mined, aka 15:30 June 17th (GMT+8).

— SparkPool (@sparkpool_eth) June 16, 2020

As the sender of the transaction https://t.co/h21A2Th4fw has not contacted us after 4 days we have made the final decision to distribute the tx fee to the miners of our pool. Given the amount involved we believe 4 days is sufficient time for the sender to get in touch with us.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

Before they announced their plan to distribute the reward, Ethermine Pool and SparkPool had frozen the transaction because they believed the attached fee was a mistake or a typo.

Until June 15 and June 16 respectively, Ethermine and SparkPool were waiting for the sender of the transaction to reach out to them so that they could come to some sort of resolution. But after giving the sender of the transaction four and six days to come forward, the pools decided to go ahead and distribute the multi-million dollar reward among the miners that were active at the time the transaction went through on June 10 and 11.

The pool decided to distribute the $2.6 million transaction fee among its miners because the sender of the transaction did not step forward and the mining pool was receiving several fake claims from individuals pretending to be the sender of the transaction.

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 will be done according to a miner hashrate snapshot we took at the time block 10241999 was mined by our Ethermine pool.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

Although many individuals claimed to be the sender of the $2.6 million fee transaction, none of them were able to provide a valid signature, which would have proved that they were indeed the ones controlling the wallet address that sent the transaction.

Ethermine won’t be so kind in the future

The mining pool also made it clear that if this situation happens again in the future—in which a transaction is sent with an abnormally large transaction fee—that they would not be freezing the transaction, and that they would be distributing the rewards to their miners right away, no matter how large the transaction is.

Also we would like to make clarify that in the future we will no longer interfere in the payout of large tx fees. Our advertised payout policy is to always distribute the full block reward and we will be sticking to that independent on the amount involved.

— Bitfly (@etherchain_org) June 15, 2020

The fact that Ethermine Pool even froze the transaction for four days was a nice gesture. There is no rule saying that they had to do this, or no evidence that the large transaction fee was actually a mistake. 

At the time Ethermine Pool announced that they would be distributing the transaction fee, SparkPool still had the June 10th transaction frozen and was waiting for the sender of the transaction to step forward so that they could come to a resolution together.

“At present, the real sender has not contacted [us], we once again made a statement hoping to get in touch,” said Shelton Qiu, key account manager of SparkPool.

However, Qui said “There will be instructions this week, which will specify the deadline to wait for, and allow time for us to contact the payer,” which indicates that SparkPool is giving the sender of the transaction a finite amount of time to step forward before they distribute the transaction fee among their miners.

One day later on June 16, SparkPool made their official announcement, claiming that they had given the sender of the transaction a week to come forward, and had not heard anything, therefore, they said that they would distribute the transaction fee on June 17–seven days after the transaction was originally sent.