Recovering Lost BNB And Polygon Crypto Assets With Coinbase

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It’s fair to say that some aspects of crypto are complicated, especially if you’re just starting to find your feet in this burgeoning asset class.

There are thousands of different tokens and multiple blockchains to contend with when buying, selling and moving your crypto assets.

You might start off buying crypto on one exchange before moving it to a self-custody wallet for extra security, only to decide you want to transfer it back to an exchange to sell it.

You might buy different coins on different blockchains, not all of which will be supported by the exchange you wish to transact with at a later stage.

All this can increase the chances of you making a costly mistake during a transfer which results in the permanent loss of your assets.

Fortunately, exchanges like Coinbase offer an asset recovery tool which in 2024 was expanded to cover BNB Smart Chain and Polygon. Previously only Ethereum support was offered.

Lost crypto asset recovery – BNB Smart Chain

There’s nothing worse than that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise you’ve made a costly mistake.

Unfortunately, this is all too common in the cryptosphere due to the sheer number of different coins, blockchains and protocols that exist.

Here’s a case study detailing a typical mistake involving BNB Smart Chain and Coinbase:

You buy Chainlink (LINK) on Binance on the BNB Smart Chain. You then move the token from the exchange to your MetaMask wallet (having added support BNB) for safekeeping as you like the idea of being your own bank.

In the meantime your bank stops supporting fiat transfers to and from Binance meaning you need to use another exchange if you want to sell you tokens for cash.

You initiate a transfer of your LINK tokens to Coinbase which involves generating a receive address which you need to add to MetaMask.

However, Coinbase has given you a receive address on the Ethereum blockchain as it doesn’t support BNB Smart Chain. You don’t spot the disparity and confirm the transaction in your MetaMask wallet.

You wait impatiently for the coins to arrive in your Coinbase exchange account (not wallet), but nothing appears.

Previously, this would have meant your tokens were lost forever. They’d still be sat on the blockchain but there would be no way of getting them into your wallet.

Now, however, there’s a way of retrieving them.

How to use the Coinbase crypto asset recovery tool

Taking the example above, to successfully use the Coinbase asset recovery tool to recover BNB Smart Chain transactions there are two crucial pieces of information you’ll need: the transaction ID (TX) and receiving address.

You’ll be able to find this in the activity log of the wallet you used to send the token, such as MetaMask. You can also get a more detailed look at the transaction on BscScan using the TX hash.

You’ll then need to login to Coinbase and head over to the asset recovery page and follow the instructions.

The process is very straightforward and involves entering the ID and address information above and connecting the self-custody wallet you want the coins to be returned to (ie MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet).

All being well, your tokens will be successfully recovered and will appear in your chosen wallet.

It’s important to remember that they’ll still be on BNB Smart Chain so you’ll need to use an exchange that supports this in order to sell them, or use what’s known as a crypto bridge from your wallet to transfer the assets cross-chain.

A crypto bridge creates a link between different blockchains meaning that cryptoassets can be efficiently sent between them and swapped.

How much does crypto asset recovery cost?

Coinbase charges a 5% fee to recover amounts over $100, while small amounts are free, aside from the transaction cost of moving the assets on-chain to your chosen wallet.

According to Coinbase, the expansion of the tool will support the recovery of some 3,000 tokens on BNB Smart Chain which are unsupported by the exchange.

Final word

Each year a huge number of tokens are misplaced through user error. In many cases, the tokens are irretrievably lost and will sit in the crypto ether forever.

Some researchers have suggested that as many as 6 million Bitcoins (BTC) worth hundreds of billions of dollars at the time of writing are now inaccessible.

This includes coins sat in self-custody wallets that are no longer retrievable due to lost hardware wallets, passwords, private keys or mnemonic seed phrases.

If the figure above is correct, it means some 30% of the total number of Bitcoins that will ever exist has gone forever.

Extrapolate this across the entire crypto ecosystem and you begin to understand the scale of the problem.

In the case of Bitcoin for example, many people will have simply discarded the wallet or login information due to the fact that at one point BTC was virtually worthless.

A whole industry has been built up around crypto sleuths who attempt to recover lost crypto on behalf of owners.

There have been some notable successes, especially if the owners can remember some of the information needed to access the coins. However, there are also a huge number of scammers operating in this space as well.

The takeaway from all this is that even if the coin you’re currently ‘hodling’ is only worth pennies, keep all the information required to access it safe in case one day it explodes.

The same is of course true for all your crypto holdings, especially if you’re storing them on self-custody hardware or software wallets.

Also, double and triple check send and receive networks and addresses before you make any crypto transaction. It’s always worth doing a small test transfer first to make sure.

Need help recovering your crypto? Get in touch.