On Tuesday, crypto exchange Binance’s product team held an “ask me anything” session with users on Reddit. Of particular note was a discussion that arose regarding recovery fees for cryptocurrencies sent on networks other than the recipient’s Binance wallet address. According to user Maxx3141, who raised the issue:
“I accidentally sent WETH [wrapped Ether] to my Polygon address two months ago. Your exchange supports Polygon, but only for MATIC. It was only worth $100. I heard that previously you could get it back for a fee of $30, and I thought that was fine. But when I contacted you, I found out that you just raised the fee to 500 BUSD.”
Another user, Superb_Dragonfruit63, also raised the issue of having to pay 500 BUSD for crypto recoveries on mismatched transactions. To which Binance staff responded:
“Retrieving tokens requires technical and operational effort, so we charge a certain fee for processing. It would cost similar effort and time regardless of value. Thanks for the feedback, we will continue to review our fee structure as we move forward. “
Unlike non-custodial wallets, centralized exchange wallets require matching escrow network addresses between sender and recipient. Therefore, Accidents such as sending unlisted tokens or coins on different networks that are otherwise supported (i.e. sending Bep-20 BNB to an ERC-20 ETH address) will result in funds not appearing in the interface exchange user. Instead, exchange staff must manually access your wallet address to retrieve the funds.
A few months earlier, Binance charged 0.001 BTC (about $40 at the time) to recover user funds that were mistakenly sent. However, not everyone was sympathetic to the users expressing their displeasure at the fee increase. An individual, gamma55, wrote a while ago in a post on the same topic:
“Since Binance has to pass the issue to someone with privileges to do manual transfers from hot wallets, the fee is pretty normal, actually. The normal hourly price for a person in that range [con privilegio de acceso] it’s easily hundreds of dollars, so they just bill you what they would do for larger clients. Don’t send coins and tokens on the wrong networks, and it won’t cost you a penny more. Fifty dollars was too cheap and was probably abused to get support for unsupported things.”
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