If you have ever accidentally sent your cryptos to the wrong wallet address, you will know that feeling of your stomach lurching. That is because moving cryptocurrencies between addresses is an irreversible process. That means that unlike credit card or eWallet payments where you have a recourse for mistaken payments, with crypto payments once you have made the transaction, they can neither be reversed nor cancelled. The only real recourse you have is to contact the person you sent the mistaken payments to and ask them to return it minus the two-way transaction fees. Ouch.
Even if you could contact the wallet or exchange and inform them of the mistake, experience tells us that you will undergo a painful process of trying to speak to an actual real human. Exchanges and wallets which are mostly unregulated are notoriously opaque, and it is often hard and frustrating to get in touch with support staff.
Exchanges taking a bite
Exchanges taking a bit include those like HitBTC, where mistakenly sent transactions will not be refunded. Other exchanges have a “cross chain recovery policy”. This is where support will recover your tokens, but it will cost you. CoinExchange.io charges 0.05 BTC per recovery, Bittrex charges its users 0.1 BTC, and they only recover sums that exceed $5000.
For Ethereum sent to an ERC-20 token address, CoinExchange will impose a fee of 10% of the total deal size. And if your ERC-20 tokens are sent to incorrect addresses, you will sadly pay a 0.5 ETH fee.
Address changes
Just to add insult to injury, you will notice that with some exchanges every time you receive funds of bitcoin and bitcoin cash, your address will change each time. Your Ethereum address however will stay the same. This is a feature that deters cyber criminals who are often able to follow your entire transaction history. It effectively improves privacy, however it can cause further copy and paste errors for every transaction you receive.
Bitcoin’s algorithms are able to spot typos, true and they sometimes spot the mistake before you make it. Yet, still it is far better to have some kind of control in place which gives you a safety net. So the point is you have to be super careful not to make a mistake. But human error is entirely possible and actually quite probable. There must be a better way?
Luckily this company has come up with a fail-safe way to protect your transactions. They are called ethbox, and they have created a smart contract-based digital escrow service that promises secure transactions across the Ethereum blockchain for any size of transaction, with additional networks planned for future integration.
With ethbox, users can send or receive Ethereum by working with an intermediary smart contract that will hold the funds while verifying that whoever gets them, has the same wallet address matching the intended recipient. Ethbox also provides users with the perfect environment to conduct OTC transactions in, making it a highly useful tool for crypto holders and traders.
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