“It’s a huge amount to me”: PulseChain user pleads for $100k gas fee refund

Crypto is a risky business; some make millions overnight, while others lose it all in the blink of an eye. Hacks, rug pulls, and phishing scams can all cause such hefty losses, but often simple user error can cause painful losses.

One such costly mistake was picked up by the X (formerly Twitter) blockchain tracker Whale Alert. It reported that one unlucky user had unwittingly paid an eye-watering gas fee of 31 ETH, worth over $100,000.

The user reached out to the recipient of the gas fee, TitanBuilder, via an on-chain message viewable on the Etherscan block explorer. They appealed to the block builder to return the 31 ETH, which they said “is a huge amount of money to me.”

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The message blamed a “buggy wallet” for sending the transaction on Ethereum instead of PulseChain. Both networks run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which means transactions valid on one EVM chain will be valid on another.

It’s an issue that stems from choosing which gas fee to pay to have the transaction processed. On PulseChain, gas fees are paid in PLS rather than ETH, and, according to data from CoinMarketCap, PLS is currently worth fractions of a cent compared to approximately $3,650 per ETH.

Coinbase’s Conor Grogan called for the block builder to earn some good karma by returning the funds. However, he also noted that the ETH had been forwarded onto an exchange account, which Titan builder’s address appears to execute automatically.

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Grogan himself spends his spare time attempting to track down and reunite crypto users with lost or forgotten funds. Earlier today, he announced his “largest recovery ever” of $3 million for crypto exchange Gate.