Antpool to return overpayment of over 400 million yen in Bitcoin transaction fees

Overpayment fee of over 400 million yen

On the 30th, major mining pool Antpool announced that it would refund 83 Bitcoin (BTC) fees that a user overpaid. It tells you how to verify your identity. The possibility of hacking as a cause is also emerging.

This is because on the 23rd, a user paid a gas fee (transaction fee) of 83.65 BTC (equivalent to a market value of 470 million yen) for a remittance of 55.77 BTC (equivalent to a market value of 310 million yen). That means users were paying more than 120,000 times more than they normally would.

Antpool’s risk management system, which processed the transaction, detected the unusual transaction and temporarily froze the fee. We are asking senders to contact us by December 10th.

The identity verification process involves sending your details to AntPool using a signature tool (Electrum or Bitcoin Core) and inviting you to sign a message with the code “AntPool” using the private key of the address provided by AntPool. .

In a similar case, in September, Web3 payment service provider Paxos mistakenly paid 75 million yen worth of BTC as transaction fees. In this case, a refund was made to Paxos through the mining pool F2Pool that was processing the transaction.

connection: PayPal partner Paxos overpaid 75 million yen in Bitcoin fees

Possibility of hacking also emerges

Regarding this excessive payment, there were voices pointing out that the sender may have mistakenly selected a high fee, or that there was a possibility that the sender had mistakenly selected a high fee, or that there was an unanticipated recognition of the trade replacement (RBF) order.

RBF is a procedure in which an unconfirmed transaction in the memory pool is replaced with another transaction that is approved faster than the other transaction by paying a higher than usual fee. Some speculated that the sender in this case did not know that RBF orders cannot be canceled.

However, on the 24th, an X (formerly known as Twitter) user came forward to say that he was the one who made the transaction. He mentions the possibility that there was a hack.

According to user 83_5BTC, he created a new cold wallet and sent 139 BTC to it, but for some reason the funds were immediately transferred to another wallet.

“83_5BTC” speculates that someone may have been running a malicious script on the wallet, which was causing inaccurate fee calculations.

83_5BTC also said it signed a message proving ownership of the private key that carried out the transaction, which proves the funds in question are its own.

Memory pool developer Mononaut confirmed this and commented that “83_5BTC” was indeed in charge of the private key used when paying a large amount of fees.

The signature checks out, @83_5BTC Apparently controls the key that paid that 83.7 BTC fee.

1/ https://t.co/vmZFn6sozN pic.twitter.com/rFcxmxOCwO

— mononaut (@mononautical) November 27, 2023

However, he added that if the wallet was hacked, it may have been signed by the hacker, and AntPool would need to use a different method of verifying the victim’s identity than it currently proposes.

Mononaut opines that if they had used a low-entropy wallet, that could have made the hack possible. Low-entropy wallets are wallets that generate seed phrases with insufficient randomness, making them vulnerable to attacks.

connection: Cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex hacked, over $100 million leaked

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