Crypto exchange Coinbase has created a new tool to help users recover tokens accidentally sent there.
In an announcement on Thursday, Coinbase said its new asset recovery tool would help users recover up to 4,000 unsupported ERC-20 tokens sent to their wallet on the exchange.
When a user sends an unsupported token to Coinbase, they aren’t acknowledged on the exchange’s internal ledger because Coinbase doesn’t have the private keys required to reverse these transactions. This results in the cryptocurrency being effectively “unrecoverable.”
Coinbase’s new tool aims to provide a way for users to reclaim these assets that would have otherwise been lost. In order to recover funds, users will need to provide the Ethereum TXID (transaction ID) for the transaction and the Coinbase address of where the asset was lost.
“This self-service tool makes asset recovery a simple step-by-step process while protecting the private keys for customer deposit addresses,” tweeted Coinbase on Thursday.
For the moment, the tool only supports select ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum base layer, such as Wrapped Ethereum (wETH), TrueUSD (TUSD) and staked Ethereum (stETH). The exchange said it is looking into expanding the recovery tool’s scope to include more assets.
Coinbase will charge a 5% recovery fee for amounts that exceed $100 in addition to a network fee that applies to all recoveries. The feature will not be available in Japan or on Coinbase Prime, the exchange said.
The new feature will likely be a welcome development for users who have lost coins in this manner.
“Thousands if not millions of investor money has been lost and coins burned for no reason other than mislabeled tokens,” tweeted one crypto trader earlier this year.
