Following DeversiFi’s $23.7 million single transaction fee (which was later reimbursed by the miner), another large transaction fee was accidentally wasted.
It seems that the individual who paid the money was attempting to participate in a Strips token sale on SushiSwap’s newly established token sale platform, the MISO launchpad. However, the token auction was so hotly contested that it sold out in six seconds, with 14 addresses scooping up all of the tokens.
During the fast sale, the participant tried to gain an edge by using Flashbots. Flashbots is an Ethereum user-to-miner communication protocol that allows users to effectively pay miners to gain precedence in freshly generated blocks, giving them a significant advantage in a highly competitive auction.
However, it seems that something has gone wrong. Transactions made by Flashbots are intended to remain secret until they’re included in a block. However, it seems that the transaction made its way into the public mempool in this instance.
Normal Ethereum transactions are initially kept in the publicly available mempool before being broadcast to the network.
The transaction was processed by an Ethereum miner and included in a block as a consequence of the error. The transaction failed because the token auction sold out too fast, and the potential buyer got no tokens. Despite this, they were forced to pay the transaction costs, which totaled 123 ETH ($430,000).
If the transaction had been handled properly (rather than broadcast to the mempool), it would not have gone through since it was not intended to secure any tokens.
The same Ethereum user used Flashbots to make a second transaction for the same token sale. They probably chose to cancel it after seeing the exorbitant expenses of the previous one. To do so, they had to send another transaction to the network to instruct it to cancel the previous one, which cost them 30 ETH ($105,000).
