Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Coinbase recently launched a new tool that helps customers recover funds - so-called ERC-20 tokens that have been lost in transfer.
But how could something go lost in transfer in the first place? Well, let’s imagine your good old leather wallet for a second. You are at home, put in a few dollars, go to the supermarket, and use them. No problem.
But now let’s imagine you also have a few Euros from your last trip. You put them in a separate compartment of your wallet because that’s just the place where any money goes. But because they are Euros, you can’t use them at the local supermarket. So eventually you just forget and that’s the end of that.
In crypto, things are a bit like that. You can send money, which crypto people call tokens, to a crypto wallet. But when those tokens are not officially supported by your wallet, you can’t use them, and in many cases, they won’t even show up. They are there though, just tugged away invisibly.
That’s an inconvenience. The real problem is this: When you don’t actually own the wallet, but your exchange, such as Coinbase does, you can’t send it back. It’s stuck because they don't support moving that kind of token around.
That's pretty annoying, and people make this mistake a lot. So often, in fact, that Coinbase created that tool we mentioned. It can reverse those transactions so you can finally access that unsupported money.
Sounds pretty useful, but don't think for a second that there isn't a catch - Coinbase will charge you a fat 5% of anything you recover over $100. Your misfortune, their business opportunity.
Oh, and more more thing: Of course you can find the link to the Coinbase Asset Recovery tool in the shownotes.
Tool: https://www.coinbase.com/asset-recovery
Help center: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/sending-or-receiving-cryptocurrency/lost-assets
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