Uniswap Trader Accidentally Pays Thousands For A Relatively Small Transaction

 Although not as serious as the time over AUD 6 million in fees were paid out for a little over AUD 100 thousand, a Uniswap user recently made a comparably large blunder.

Human Error

When facilitating a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain, miners are paid a fee for their effort – some to cover the cost of electricity resulting from the use of processing power, and some as profit. The cost of the transaction is referred to as “gas” and is measured in Gwei.

Although miner fees have been rising in recent months, the current average price is 0.0022 ETH – AUD 1.47 at the time this article was written.

In order to have their transaction prioritized, the person requesting the transaction can manually increase the miner fee. However, this leaves the door open for typos and other errors – such as the one made by a trader who goes by the alias “ProudBitcoiner” on Reddit.

While exchanging 0.2955 wrapped Ether (WETH) for 531 chi gas tokens (CHI) – an amount worth about 164 AUD – the trader accidentally paid 23.5172 ETH – worth almost AUD 13.5 thousand.

The trader stated in his Reddit post that the error arose when he mistakenly entered 200,000 in the “Gas Price” field instead of the “Gas Limit” field. The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas that can be used in a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.

Although in the past miners have agreed to send back some or all of the money – such as when Sparkpool returned half of an accidental USD 300,000 fee to the sender – the decision to return the funds is ultimately up to the miner.

In the Reddit post, the unfortunate crypto trader stated that he had contacted the mining platform and was hoping to hear back from them.