Coinbase has introduced a feature that will help customers recover more than 4,000 as-yet unsupported ERC-20 tokens sent to its ledger.
Major cryptocurrency platform Coinbase has offered an asset recovery tool for users who “mistakenly send unsupported tokens” to exchange addresses.In a Dec. 15 announcement, Coinbase said users who sent any of roughly 4,000 ERC-20 tokens to a Coinbase address could recover their previously unrecoverable funds by providing “the Ethereum TXID for the transaction where the asset was lost and the contract address of the lost asset.”
The exchange announced that certain ETC-20 coins, such as Wrapped Ether (wETH), TrueUSD (TUSD), and staked Ether (STETH), would be subject to recovery with a 5% fee on transactions above $100.
“Our recovery tool is able to move unsupported assets directly from your inbound address to your self-custodial wallet without exposing private keys at any point,” said Coinbase. “We did this by using patent pending technology to send the funds directly from your inbound address without processing the funds through our centralized exchange infrastructure.”
Since nearly the inception of the cryptocurrency industry, many consumers have dealt with funds that were delivered in error. A Canadian court concluded in a case from 2018 that a user who got 530 Ether (ETH $1,269)530 Copytrack (CPY) tokens, which are no longer valid, were needed to return them.
A similar decision was rendered by an Australian judge in a case where Crypto.com accidentally handed a consumer $10.5 million rather than a $100 refund. Other significant exchanges appear to provide recovery for comparable transactions on an individual basis.
In its support pages, Binance stated that it “does not offer a token/coin recovery service” and that it may decide to help users “solely at its discretion.” Users were advised to get in touch with Crypto.com’s customer service team and were warned that “fund retrieval may not be possible in some cases”, globally, there are more than 100 million users of Coinbase.
The exchange’s estimated trading revenue for 2022, according to CEO Brian Armstrong’s report from December, will be “roughly half” that of 2021. The platform also noted that demands for information pertaining to criminal investigations from law enforcement authorities had grown.