Foundry USA Pool has made headlines by returning 8.18 BTC transaction fee, worth about $777,000, that was accidentally overpaid. Well done, this is fair play!
Costly mistake
The mishap occurred on December 19 during the mining of block 875475, because the transaction fee was 91,127 times higher than necessary.
Once Foundry realized the blunder, they quickly reached out to the sender and refunded the excess fee after a thorough review.
In a statement to The MinerMag, they reassured their regular customers that this refund wouldn’t mess with their payouts.
How? By disregarding the three highest and three lowest transaction fees each day in their payout system.
Legend
Foundry took to Twitter to express gratitude for all the industry support they received regarding this situation, and they mentioned how they’d handle similar cases on an individual basis moving forward.
After all, nobody wants to be the person who accidentally sends too much Bitcoin!
Also, this isn’t the first time such an incident has happened either. Just last November, Antpool had to refund $3 million Bitcoin transaction fee due to user error, after someone mistakenly submitted 83 BTC as a fee.
Remember the name
Despite this hiccup, Foundry remains a heavyweight in the Bitcoin mining arena, boasting a massive hash rate of 273.6 EH/s, far surpassing Antpool’s 146.7 EH/s.
Hashrate Index’s numbers show that Foundry controls nearly 38% of the market share among mining pool operators, while Antpool holds about 18%.
But not all news is rosy for Foundry, as just weeks ago, reports surfaced that they laid off around 60% of their workforce as part of a realignment strategy.
Originally employing about 250 people, they reassigned 20 staff members but let go around 160-170 employees, including the entire ASIC repair and hardware teams.
