Bitcoin mining company returns fee of R$2.5 million that Paxos paid in error

Paxos, the blockchain company responsible for issuing PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD and a partner of other crypto companies, admitted that it mistakenly paid 19.8 Bitcoins, valued at around R$2.5 million, in fees to move around R$ 10,000 in BTC. But F2Pool, the mining company that received the fee, said it will return it.

As CriptoFácil reported, the costly error occurred on September 10th. The account that warns of large transactions, Whale Alert, was the one who warned about the movement. Although the account paid a fee of almost R$10,000, the average network fee at that time on the Bitcoin network was around R$10.

Initially, Mempool’s Mononautical attributed the movement to PayPal and said it was the highest fee ever paid for a Bitcoin transaction in dollars. However, the one who made the mistake was Paxos. The company reported the error on September 13th and explained that it was their server that made the transfer.

Paxos will have Bitcoins back

After informing about the mistaken payment, Paxos assured its users that their funds were safe and that the funds belonged to the company. The company also clarified that PayPal was not involved in the error.

Almost a day after Paxos’ claims, the Bitcoin mining company that received the funds reported on X (formerly Twitter) that it had agreed to refund the amount to Paxos. The mining company asked its X followers what they would do in its place. The majority voted to just distribute the money to other Bitcoin miners.

However, this advice does not appear to have been followed. After all, blockchain data shared by Bitcoin explorer Mempool confirmed that the funds were indeed returned on September 15th.

This is not, however, the first time that someone has paid a very high fee to move a much smaller amount of cryptocurrencies. In 2019, an Ethereum user lost almost $400,000 worth of Ether after making the mistake of pasting values ​​into the wrong fields.

On occasion, Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool helped the user recover half of the lost funds.