Friday 13 Strikes: Crypto Exchange Employee Makes USD 82,000 Fee Gaffe

Friday 13 proved to be an unlucky day for a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, and for one staff member in particular – with an employee error at Coinone leading to the platform apparently frittering away some USD 82,000 worth of ethereum (ETH) in fees on a transaction worth a fraction of a cent.

It appears that the employee made the blunder while manually processing a minuscule altcoin transaction conducted using synthetic network token (SNX) – with the staff member in question slapping a cool transaction fee of over ETH 656 on the transaction.

You can view the transaction in all of its glory here.

The transaction was made for SNX 0.00000001. SNX, ranked 57th by market capitalization, is currently (15:58 UTC) trading at around USD 0.48.

Coinone appears to have been testing SNX performance on its platform.

Per media outlet Decenter, Coinone has called the incident an “accident caused by negligence.”

The embarrassed exchange added that “a mistake” had been made during a “manual process.”

An official from the exchange stated, also per Decenter,

“This was a mistake that occurred due to recent changes that we have made to our internal system. We have reorganized the protocols we use in our transaction testing process to avoid any repetition.”