User paid $430,000 commission for failed transaction

Another incident involving an abnormally large commission payment on the Ethereum network occurred on October 13. A user wanted to participate in the sale of Strips tokens on MISO (owned by SushiSwap) and paid a $430,000 commission, but never received the tokens they wanted.

There was a lot of excitement around the Strips project in the run-up to the tokensale, so the sale of tokens was literally instantaneous. They sold out in six seconds, with only 14 addresses receiving tokens.

One user decided to use Flashbots to gain an advantage. Flashbots is a protocol for connecting users with Ethereum miners. It lets you bribe the miners so that the user's transaction can be added to the blockchain faster. This gives them an advantage in the highly competitive sale of tokens.

But this time, something must have gone wrong. The transaction in Flashbots is supposed to remain confidential until it is included in the blockchain. But this time it went straight to the mempool, where it was quickly received and processed by one of the miners. Because the tokenseal was done too quickly, the user's transaction was not executed. As a result, he did not receive any tokens at all, but paid 123 ETH ($430,000) in fees.

If the transaction had been processed in the standard way through Flashbots, this incident would not have happened. But for some reason, it went straight to mempul.