A Litecoin user has recently sent a transaction that included a fee of little over 200 LTC (about $20,500) attached to it. The huge fee was attached to a transaction in which the sender was merely moving 8.88 LTC (around $910).
As first reported by Litecoin.com, the transaction was quickly mined by Chinese-based mining pool LTC.Top after being included within block 1636831. The mysterious transaction saw the average transaction fee on the Litecoin network surge from around $0.05 to $0.70.
This is notably the average transaction fee litecoin users were paying when the cryptocurrency was closed to its all-time high of $400 in December of 2017, before the crypto bear market saw the price of most cryptocurrencies drop by over 80%.
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— CryptoGlobe (@CryptoGlobeInfo) February 27, 2019
Notably, the Litecoin user sent little over 8.88 LTC in the transaction that included such a high fee. The transaction reportedly appears to have been made as someone was consolidating their funds, with most ending up where they originated.
The address that sent the transaction was first seen last year, and has made over 2,500 transactions since then. It currently has a balance of over 322.6 LTC. Its large balance and transaction frequency suggests it belongs to a cryptocurrency-related business and not an individual.
On social media, users have speculated on the large transaction fee. While some believe an honest mistake could have led to such a large fee, others have pointed to alternative theories. One user claimed it could be cryptocurrency miners laundering money.
Notably this isn’t the first time we’ve seen huge transaction fees attached to seemingly normal transactions in the crypto space. Earlier this year an Ethereum mining pool decided to freeze a mysterious $300,000 block reward, to later on be contacted by a user revealing he accidentally sent the transaction with the large fee.
After being able to conclude the person who contacted the pool was the person behind the transaction, ETH mining pool Sparkpool decided to split the $330,000 ETH fee with the user who sent it, instead of keeping it all to itself.