Someone just paid 23.5 ETH in fees for a $120 transaction via Metamask

By ircrp | ircrp | 5 Nov 2020

With those using tools like Metamask for performing transaction on the Etherum blockchain, most will find out their initial journey will consists of few failures before they get it right. Most notably and annoyingly the transactions which tend to throw people off are the ones which fail due to being out of gas.

That's how it began on 4th of November 2020 with a user having performed an initial transaction via Metamask to a Uniswap V2 contract, resulting in a failure of the transaction due to Out of gas error code. Presumably the user would've just used the default recommended gas fees configurations at the time by Metamask and due to rise of transaction on Etherum blockchain would've not qualified for such low gas fees within a given time period.
Having observed the failure of transaction the person would've been now tempted to use advanced configuration of the gas fees within Metamask so to increase the gas fees parameters and increase the chances of the transaction succeeding.
The misery of the story is the modification of the wrong parameter, rather than configuring the Gas Limit to 200,000 the user has inserted the value into the Gas Price, resulting in a transaction fee of 23.5172 Ether ($9,448.74) in exchange for 531 Chi Gastoken (CHI) ($121.16)