China-based blockchain mining platform SparkPool has managed to settle a mix-up involving an erroneous payment to it of over 2,000 ETH, or more than $370,000, for mining fees.

On February 19, a user – who has not been identified so far – mistakenly sent a total of 2,730 ETH in three transactions to SparkPool. The transfers had occurred after transaction input fields had supposedly been mixed up and were entered wrongly.

As the total amount received is some 600 times its usual mining reward, SparkPool immediately froze the mysterious funds while waiting to see if the sender might come forward. The sender later proposed a solution to SparkPool where it can keep half of 2,100 ETH – if it could return the other half. 2,100 ETH was the largest single amount sent of the 3 broadcasted transactions.

On its Twitter (Mar 10), SparkPool shared a message from the sender after agreeing to the arrangement and seeing it through:

“Thank you SparkPool and your miners for helping us to recover our loss, we are willing to share half of 2100 ETH with the miners to thanks the miners’ integrity.”

Sparkpool then generated a bilingual response in Chinese and English, saying, “Thanks for your understanding and generosity.”

Due to the very nature of public blockchains, errors in transactions are usually not reversible or modifiable once a payment has been executed. While such erroneously made transfers are not rare, subsequent returns or refunds are usually assumed to be, and are generally dependent on the goodwill of the receiving party.  

Certain blockchains such as EOS, however, contain features that allow for transaction reversals to be made, though such functions have been criticized within the community for going against the spirit of how blockchain should operate.