A recent bitcoin transaction that was tracked to Paxos, paid an absurdly high transaction cost of $510,000—nearly 250,000 times the typical network fee of $2.17. The additional transaction fees have reportedly been sent back to Paxos by the miner F2Pool. The business admitted its error and blamed the inflated cost on a glitch in a single transfer.

In his analysis of the situation, Jameson Lopp, the co-founder of CasaHODL, suggested that the problem might be caused by faulty software coming from an exchange or payment processor address.

Lopp claims that the address has sent and received more than 60,000 transactions and that it most likely calculated the outcome of the modification incorrectly, resulting in transaction fee issues. 

Paxos acknowledged the error three days after the strange transaction took place. It was very clear that this technical mishap was due to a faulty code. User’s money however is secure, according to the corporation. They also quickly clarified that Paxos was exclusively to blame for the error and that PayPal was not involved in it.

After agreeing to refund the money to Paxos, Chun Wang, the co-founder of F2Pool took to Twitter to vent about his regret on the decision. When Chun polled his followers, the majority chose the option to simply distribute the money among further bitcoin miners.

According to mempool.space, the 19.8 bitcoin in question have already been returned to the sender address.