Lost my ADA?

Hello there, I’m a BSC user and I see a few people have been struggling, so I decided to write a little guide. Hopefully this well help figure this out.

When you use binance and you withdraw your ADA, you can choose on which blockchain you want to transfer it.
You have 3 options :

  • Cardano (the real one, that you should use with deadalus/yoroi)
  • BEP2 (that’s the blockchain that they use on the exchange itself and the least useful)
  • BEP20 (That’s the Binance smart chain network and where you ADA is. Check the transaction to make sure)

If you’ve sent to BEP2 or BEP20, the easiest for you to get it back to Binance would be to use the binance chain wallet (You can do it with Metamask too but the UX isn’t that great)

When you withdraw to BEP2 or BEP20, your ADA becomes a wrapped version of ADA. This has some advantages, for example you can use BSC DeFi platform such as venus or pancakeswap to stake your ada/borrow against it, or trade it on one of the varius Dex (1inch). That means that you can sell it or buy it potentially for cheaper, depending on the market conditions. Once the Cardano dapps start rolling, similar services will start showing up on the Cardano chain.

If you want to send your ADA to the Cardano chain, you have to send it back to your Binance account, then you can withdraw it to a Cardano address that belongs to you.

Binance Chain Wallet instructions

Note that you do not need to use Binance Chain Wallet, and you can also get your ADAbep20 address manually from the ADA deposit page on binance, and transfer to that directly!

Personally I use both Binance Chain Wallet and Metamask. Binance Chain Wallet is perfect to transfer funds from your bsc compatible wallet and your funds on the exchange.

Go on the Chrome extension store and download the Binance chain wallet.
Import your bsc wallet with either your private key or your seed phrase (Do not share that key/phrase with anyone)

Go to your binance dashboard and click on wallet direct. This will link your Binance account to your Binance chain wallet.

You should now be able to see your wrapped ADA in the Binance Chain wallet.

You can now click on Send, select your asset, and in address, you will see your Binance account wallet address.

Network fees

On the BSC chain, you need BNB to pay for the transfer fees. So you might have to transfer some BNB first to that wallet. The fees are really cheap (around 5cent on average), so transfer some BNB first in order to cover for the fees (use BEP20).

Once you’ve the wrapped ADA back to Binance, it will show under ADA, and you can now withdraw to your Deadalus wallet :sunglasses:

It’s confusing at first, so good luck !

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