An unidentified Bitcoin user has just shelled out a transaction fee of 1.5 Bitcoin (BTC), equivalent to $100,254, based on the current market price. The exorbitant fee was brought to light on Saturday by Whale Alert, a popular service that tracks large cryptocurrency transactions.
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 4, 2024
A fee of 1.5 #BTC (100,254 USD) has just been paid for a single transaction!https://t.co/w8FNXu2GOY
The fee is quite higher than the average transaction cost, resulting in wild speculation regarding the circumstances that might have led to such an expensive fee. This Bitcoin user paid this high fee to have their transaction included in an ordinary Bitcoin block.
Possible Reasons
Bitcoin transaction fees are dolled out to miners as part of their reward for verifying transactions and including them in new blocks added to Bitcoin’s blockchain. Normally, Bitcoin users can pay any amount they wish for transaction fees. If the transaction fee is too low, miners might not accept it, and if it’s outrageously high, miners are incentivized miners to process the transaction more quickly.
Average transaction fees are typically around $2 or $4 but rose to as high as $128 recently amid the quadrennial halving event and debut of Casey Rodarmor’s new Runes. This represented a record-level period in terms of fees, with a few costly, urgent transactions skewing the metric.
However, transaction fees have since stabilized, and the latest sky-high fee appears to be an individual error instead of a wider market impact. It could also be reasons known only to the sender or even related to money laundering.
Over its history, Bitcoin has witnessed several high-value transaction fees. For instance, in September 2023, a Bitcoin user paid 19 BTC (worth $510,000 at the time) for a BTC transfer.
Additionally, another BTC user paid over 4 BTC in January to have their transfer added to Bitcoin block 826,032. The transaction was, therefore, charged with an eye-watering 1,800,890 sat/vB fee.
Bitcoin was valued at $63,942 at press time, shedding a measly 0.3% over the last 24 hours.
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