Tonight I was looking at ENS (ens.domains) and thought I might give it a try for a brandable domain I’ve been holding onto. So I transfer $100 CAD into my crypto.com account. No problem. Then I buy .03 ETH. No problem.
Then I go to transfer it to a MetaMask wallet since I want to use a key I control and that’s a wallet I’ve seen in docs / tutorials, but I notice the amount I’m going to get is .0022 with a .008 fee. I could hardly believe it, but their fee schedule is here. It’s .008 to transfer ETH to an external wallet. Or, based on the current price of $2690 USD, a $21.50 transaction fee.
Right now a transaction that would likely get confirmed in just over a minute (71 seconds) would cost $1.06
Exchanges pad the fees for a few reasons…
1 - You pay $21.50, they pay $1.06 and profit $20.44
2 - The network fee changes so I guess it is easier for them to just create a fixed fee? It is not just ETH. Binance has a BTC fee of 0.00050000 BTC ($18) and Gate.io has a fee of 0.00100000 BTC ($36).
Thanks. I was having trouble figuring out what the on-blockchain fees would actually be. Between eth, gas, gwei and the huge difference in price I figured I was missing something.
I’ve been pretty disappointed with crypto as I’ve been learning. It’s basically unusable as a currency and the blockchain tech that’s interesting is completely ruined by locking it behind an adult version of vBucks that my government (Canada) treats like an investment (security).
I transferred from Meta to Coinbase and was not thrilled, but OK with, the ~$1 to send the ETH to Coinbase. Less pleased when I found on Coinbase charged me $3 to receive it.
