Hi y’all,

yesterday I decided to put my remaining ETH on binance into swappable token using Uniswap.

I’ve never used it before so this is always a bit exciting. I setup a metamask wallet and found a tutorial on binance how to configure my account to use the binance smart chain as network. I thought that’d be a great idea because otherwise I’d pay a lot of fee … at least that’s what I thought.

I was already suspicious about the multiple warning in binance prior to letting me confirm the withdrawal, but I was kind of impatient and wanted to get the thing done ASAP.

I regretted immediately afterwards when I realized that my ETH was not to appear in my metamask wallet. I saw it in the bscexplorer, and now it occurred to me what had happened:

Ofc BSC uses BNB as native token, and apparently any other token lives there in form of a smart contract. At least I was eventually able to add this contract into metamask and could see that it hasn’t gone for good. But then just to learn that I couldn’t use it in uniswap.

So I decided it would be best to transfer it back to Binance and withdraw it using the standard erc20 main net. This was not possible because in order to send the token I needed to have some BNB in my wallet which was not the case.

Hence, I dug through my small portfolio to see how I could rather quickly obtain some. I ended up trading some IOTA just to learn that Binance sets a minimum withdrawal limit for BNB. So, I traded some more and sent it to my metamask wallet.

Finally, I was able to send the ETH back to binance and withdraw it again to my metamask wallet – this time on the correct network.

After that I could perform my swap in less than 10 minutes – hooray!

Cost of this expedition

~5 hrs of research and trial&error

~200Eur in fees (smart contract, gas, etc) Correction: it was less, I’ll have to check it once again – I also considered the tax on gains required due to trading my IOTA shortly.

Lessons learned

~ DYOR is easy to say but much harder to actually do. I tried to read it all up and find answers to my questions, but I guess it is a trade-off between time and money. If I do not risk to lose some, I will never ever do anything and keep hodling which is way too boring BTW I found a multitude of posts on reddit from users telling similar stories – most of them seemed like they contacted Binance support but never got to a solution.

~ Now I have an improved understanding of BSC/BNB and ETH. The way they store token. I’ve played with token in Daedalus, it is so much more convenient! Cardano will indeed eat ETHs and BNBs lunch. I’ve heard it others saying before, but now I believe it myself. Reasons are: substantial lower fees, decentralized free and open, no need for smart contracts to store non-native token.

~ I now understand much better the role and the value ETH brings to the crypto world. There is no need to downplay it, but it won’t be the end of the road. It is my firm belief that anyone who neglects this and puts faith exclusively in ETH will get burned long term.

I am already extremely curious how the experience will look like as soon as uniswap will support Cardano blockchain. The user experience of metamask and uniswap leaves not much to complain about, it is just somewhat inherent in the numerous potential pitfalls between all these exchanges and DApps using the existing blockchains and networks. My hope is that Cardano can help to eliminate many of these very common pitfalls.

Source: reddit.com

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