DeversiFi Says User Funds Are Safe After $23.7M Gas Fee Blunder

UPDATE (Sept. 28, 19:16 UTC): The miner who received the unusual transaction fee has returned the funds. Read more here.

Decentralized Ethereum-based exchange DeversiFi is looking to calm user jitters after a simple ERC-20 token transaction somehow cost the platform $23.7 million in fees.

The transaction occurred early Monday morning and was flagged two hours later on Twitter. The transaction was for $100,000 in stablecoin tether – an ERC-20 token transfer that, at the time of writing, should have cost less than $5.

While early reports indicated that the transaction originated from centralized exchange Bitfinex, DeversiFi’s tweet seems to indicate that it was an internal transaction. Both Etherscan and on-chain analytics service Nansen have the originating address labeled as belonging to Bitfinex. The address holds nearly $1.5 billion in ETH – orders of magnitude more than DeversiFi’s $45 million in total value locked, according to DeFi Pulse.

The decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, which was incubated by Bitfinex in 2017 and launched in 2018, wrote in a Tweet this morning that the high fee is the result of an internal error:

The official handle added that the team is “investigating,” that no user funds are at risk and that the platform is operating normally.

The miner who received the fee has mined 3.1848% of all Ethereum blocks in the past seven days, but has not been identified by either Nansen or Etherscan.