This is a DIY on how to recover funds sent to wrong chain
Very often people contact us with horrific stories of sending funds using wrong chains and then not being able to recover them.
Sometimes when withdrawing funds from an exchange like Binance you are teased to use a cheaper chain like BEP or POLYGON when sending ERC20 tokens, only to find out your ERC20 wallet does not support those chains.
Other times a fat finger issue makes you send ETC to ETH or the other way round.
So what is possible and what is not, when sending BSC-USDT to an ERC-20 USDT wallet?
Or what happens when you send BTC to a BCH address or vice versa?
It all depends who controls the destination wallet. Generally its possible to save the funds and move them back to the correct blockchain, but its only possible if the owner of the destination wallet wants or can.
If you moved funds to a wallet you control, like Trustwallet, Metamask, Exodus or Coinbase self custodial app, where you have the 12 or 24 words, it is with some hassle possible to move those funds back.
So what should you do when ERC 20 funds are stuck on Binance chain but they re ERC20 tokens not supported by your wallet?
Or what if you send tokens to a Ledger or Trezor hardware wallet not supported by their native app?
- The first thing you need to do is to check if you can see the funds on the destination chain. If you sent funds to BNB chain from Ethereum network you need to go to bscan.com and enter the same wallet address starting with 0x that you use to examine using etherscan.io. If the funds you are looking for are there, then you have located them.
- With your 12 or 24 word seed, you then need to recover the private key of that wallet address. You can do it in many ways, one is to install metamask, enter the seed, and keep adding wallets until your wallet shows up. Usually the first one, but if you used the address more than once, then your app might have used a different address using the derivation path generated from the seed
- The other way is to go to a site like iancoleman.io , make sure you are offline before entering your seed. After pasting the mnemonic, choose the right coin type, then choose the correct derivation path, and scroll down to the list of wallets generated from the seed. On your right hand side, you will see your private key. This string can be imported to Metamask.
4. Now when you have the private key of the destination wallet, you need to add the specific token you are looking at to metamask. First check on bscan.com or etherscan.io your wallet address. Select the token. Once selected copy the token contract address.
5. Now go back to metamask, in assets, scroll down and hit import token. Now copy the token contract address and the token should show up.
6. Now you should see the token on the wrong chain, you need to fund the wallet. Send a small amount like 10USD worth of BNB or ETH.
7. Once the wallet is funded, you can now choose the token, and send it back to the original wallet that you were sending from. If the amount is large, then try sending a small amount first, If you have received it, then go and send the rest.
NOTE! If you sent funds to an exchange, then most you would need them to move it manually as they have your keys. Most likely they will not respond or refuse to move them back. As of April 2022 this is the case with most exchanges...
Disclaimer! This article was written by KeychainX Crypto Recovery Service. To read more about our company please visit https://keychainx.io or send us an email to keychainx@protonmail.com if you need to talk about password recovery.