Coinbase Announces Asset Recovery: BNB Chain and Polygon Supported

Crypto exchange Coinbase will soon let users recover lost assets sent to the platform’s unsupported blockchains, which include BNB Chain and Polygon. The company announced this on Feb 27. Users who sent assets to Coinbase accounts on BNB Chain or Polygon would only need to give their transaction ID. They would also need to give the inbound Coinbase wallet address, and then the assets could be recovered.

Historically, these assets could not be recovered. This was partly because employees did not have the private keys. Those keys are needed to reverse the transactions, said the exchange. For assets under $100, no fee is charged to recover them. However, getting back over $100 of crypto would cost 5%.

Like regular users, crypto exchange wallets are typically set up to support multiple blockchains automatically. They also automatically support various assets. This is even if the exchanges do not support those tokens or networks for users. Reasons for not supporting them include regulatory compliance.

Coinbase Retrieval Tool Recovers $160M in Lost Assets

While wrongly sent assets could be retrieved, it takes time and effort. It also requires coordination from senior executives. They control the exchange of multisig wallets. Cointelegraph reported 2022 that Binance charged about $500 to retrieve each wrongly sent crypto asset.

Since it started, Coinbase’s recovery tool has retrieved $160 million of lost digital assets from Ethereum. About 3,000 ERC-20 tokens were wrongly sent to Coinbase via BNB Chain. About 800 such tokens were sent via Polygon.

“We’re continuously looking into expanding this feature’s scope,” wrote Coinbase. The goal is to support more assets and networks. “But we can’t guarantee that any particular asset will qualify in the future.” This is due to the technical complexities of recovering unsupported assets.

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