Yay, Free Money!
It all started when I discovered I had about $100 worth of BNB sitting in my Binance account. Great! I decided to cash it out because I don’t believe in the long-term value of crypto. Should be simple, right? Just sell the BNB, withdraw to my bank account, and move on with my life. Wrong.
See, Binance left the U.S. market years ago because it couldn’t meet regulatory requirements. As an American user, I wasn’t allowed to sell or cash out my funds directly from Binance. My only option was to transfer the BNB to another wallet or exchange, and then liquidate it afterwards. At this point, I started to get the feeling that liquidating my assets was going to be complicated, but decided to move forward anyways. It would be fun to see how much the crypto world had changed over the years. So I dove right in.
Networks, Networks, Networks
I paid the transaction fee and transferred the BNB from Binance to my MetaMask wallet. This is when I almost immediately I hit a wall. I couldn’t transfer the BNB to my exchange to sell. Turns out BNB is on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a network that my primary exchange, Coinbase, doesn’t support. The crypto world doesn’t consist of only the BTC and Eth networks anymore! I had to learn more about swaps, network bridges, and managing gas fees if I were to get my money. Below are these concepts I had to catch up on:
- Networks: Different networks (like Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Avalanche) are essentially separate blockchains that don’t directly talk to each other.
- Swaps: You can exchange one cryptocurrency for another on the same network (e.g., BNB to USDT on Binance Smart Chain), and this is called a swap.
- Bridges: To move assets between networks, you need a bridge that essentially acts as a toll booth that can migrate your assets to a different blockchain.
I couldn’t do a straight bridge, because most networks don’t support BNB. And I couldn’t only do a swap of BNB, because Coinbase doesn’t support the BSC network. So I moved forward to do my first swap and bridge. I saw that Coinbase supported USDT on the Ethereum network, so I aimed to change my BNB to be that.
Swapping and Bridging
I linked my MetaMask wallet to PancakeSwap, an exchange and swapping service. There, I paid the transaction fee and successfully swapped my BNB for USDT (a popular stablecoin). The process was smooth and surprisingly quick, no complaints there.
Next, I went to Synapse Protocol to bridge my USDT from being on the Binance Smart Chain to the Ethereum network. That’s when I discovered something really bad: bridging my assets to Ethereum would cost about $40 in gas fees, almost half of my entire stash!
It turns out Ethereum is one of the most expensive networks for bridging. After more research, I learned that bridging onto a different network would be much cheaper. Unfortunately, this also meant I couldn’t use USDT anymore, because not all crypto is supported on all networks. After playing around with the many possible options, I eventually I found a route to get my assets over to Coinbase:
- Swap my USDT for USDC
- Bridge to Avalanche, a network with significantly lower fees
- Transfer to Coinbase, which supports USDC on Avalanche
With my plan in place, I went out to do my second swap. Unfortunately, this is when everything fell apart. I didn’t realize that when you do a swap, you have to set aside a little bit of funds for future activities. I accidentally used up almost 100% of my BNB to swap to USDT, and had nothing left to fuel my swap of USDT to USDC!
Out of Gas
I leveraged AI to see what I could do. I learned about drips, DApps, and free swap services. None of them were applicable to my situation. I still had the crypto assets, but they were in my Metamask with not enough BNB to fuel any future transactions. I was completely stuck.
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