Thursday saw an unusually large spike in gas fees for the Ethereum (ETH) network, with over 140,000 transactions going to a wallet address known as Etherscan as “Binance 14.”
Transactions on Binance frequently paid costs above 300 gwei, or almost 30 times more than what was required, while the average gas fee on the Ethereum network was approximately 10 gwei.
About $10 is 300 gwei.
The extraordinary expenditure resulted in a temporary spike in gas fees on the Ethereum network, with users incurring substantial costs for sending transactions.
Binance confirms ‘routine consolidation of ETH’
Declaring it a “routine consolidation of ETH,” Binance has revealed in a press release that they were the ones who started the transactions.
A representative for the exchange stated that any unintended influence on petrol prices was swiftly fixed.
Over 530 ETH, or over $840,000 in gas fees, were used in all transactions, briefly making it the biggest gas user on the Ethereum network.
In sum, $95 million in transaction fees—both inbound and outbound—are owed by the wallet address during its lifetime.
Community reacts
On X, the occurrence was extensively discussed by the community. One user claimed that it was a consolidation “from long-inactive deposit addresses.”
Co-founder of the DeFi protocol Gnosis Martin Köppelmann expressed his opinion on the strange transactions by saying that Binance is either employing “a really inefficient script” or that “something fishy is going on.” Other people also shared their thoughts.
Lastly, some community members blamed Binance’s wallet team for the glitch, calling the team’s engineers “incapable.”
“They will release a case report soon. And likely someone got fired,” the user added.
