In Brief:
- An Ethereum user spent $430,000 on a failed transaction to participate in Strips’ MISO token sale.
- Afterwards, they spent another $105,000 on canceling a second transaction.
An Ethereum user who attempted to participate in Strips’ MISO token sale spent $430,000 for fees that too on a failed transaction.
This person wanted to participate in the MISO launchpad, which is SushiSwap’s recently launched token sale platform. But the token sale was so competitive that it sold out in six seconds and 14 addresses were able to purchase all the tokens.
To gain an advantage, the participant used Flashbots during the rapid sale. Using Flashbots, Ethereum users can effectively bribe miners to get the first crack at newly mined blocks in a highly competitive auction.
But something went awry. It appears that Flashbots transactions were somehow included in the public mempool despite being meant to be kept private until they were included in a block.
In normal Ethereum transactions, the transactions are first put in a mempool before being sent to a block.
A mistake resulted in the transaction being processed by an Ethereum miner and included in a block, but the sale sold out too quickly and the prospective buyer did not receive any tokens and resulted in a failed transaction.
However, they were still required to pay the transaction fees, which amounted to 123 ETH ($430,000).
Robert Miller, product manager at Flashbots said in a tweet, “This transaction was sent to the mempool. You can see here that Etherscan saw it in the mempol. Also, we never saw it in the Flashbots relay.”
When Flashbots process the transaction normally (and not broadcast to the mempool), by design it wouldn’t pass if it wouldn’t secure any tokens.
The same Ethereum user attempted to make a second transaction, also using Flashbots, for the same token sale. Seeing the high costs of the first, they abandoned the second.
In order to do this, they had to submit another transaction to the network informing it to cancel the first one for a fee of 30 ETH ($105,000).
This is the 2nd of this kind of incident, in the last week of September Bitfinex had paid $23.7 million in transaction fees by mistake for sending $100,000 in Tether(USDT) to the layer-2 subsidiary platform DeversiFi.
