Mining Pool Splits $300K Ether Fee With Accidental Sender

Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool has located and verified the accidental sender of an unusually high miners' fee and agreed to split the amount.

In a statement provided to CoinDesk, Sparkpool said it received an email from an anonymous user on Feb. 25, claiming that they had made a mistake by attaching the 2,100 ether ETH$3,417.53 fee on Feb. 19 – an amount worth around $300,000 at the time.

To verify that the emailer was indeed the sender of the payment, Sparkpool replied at on Feb. 25, asking that a token amount of 0.022517 ETH be sent using the same 0x587 address to the pool's address.

According to data on Etherscan, the owner sent the requested amount of ETH at 09:15 UTC the same day, after which Sparkpool agreed to negotiate on the next step, adding in the statement the sender is from a blockchain firm based in South Korea.

The final agreement now sees Sparkpool keep half of the 2,100 ETH for pool miners entitled to the reward and returning the other half to the South Korean firm.

After another request from Sparkpool, the owner of the 0x587 address made a second transaction of 0.666 ETH to Sparkpool with a paragraph coded into the transaction's hash to confirm the agreed split at 05:49 UTC today (March 11).

It reads:

"Thank you SparkPool and your miners for helping us to recover our loss, we are willing to share half of 2,100 ETH with the miners to thanks the miners' integrity."

Sparkpool has now returned 1,050 ETH to the sender.

After the payment was first sent on Feb. 19, Sparkpool temporarily froze the then mysteriously large mining reward due to the possibility that it was issued by accident.

Ether image via Shutterstock