If you've tried to send a cryptocurrency asset that Coinbase doesn’t support to your Coinbase account, the deposit will not reach your account. These funds are considered lost and can only be recovered if one of the following situations applies:
Certain assets are eligible for our recovery with our asset recovery tool, which allows you to have the lost funds recovered to a self-custodial wallet.
If an ERC20 asset becomes supported on Coinbase at a later date, any of those assets that were previously sent to your Coinbase account will automatically become available in that account.
It’s important to ensure that only supported assets are sent to your account. To see if an asset is supported/tradable on Coinbase, view our Explore page or the Trade page of your Coinbase account and filter for assets that are tradable.
Why am I able to send unsupported crypto to Coinbase?
The ERC20 protocol does not allow Coinbase to reject unsupported ERC20 deposits, and other exchanges or wallets are not able to determine if we support a specific cryptocurrency. As a reminder, please remember to verify that you are sending to the correct Ethereum address when depositing ERC20 cryptocurrencies.
Why can't Coinbase send these funds back to me automatically?
The Ethereum blockchain prevents transfers from being reversed and does not require the receiver to accept the transfer. If the assets were sent from another exchange, this makes it difficult to make sure that the deposit will return to the original sender. For these reasons, we can't automatically return unsupported ERC20 deposits that are sent to Coinbase, but the asset may be eligible for recovery.
I sent ERC20 tokens on an Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 sidechain to Coinbase. How do I recover those funds?
Assets on Ethereum-compatible Layer 2 sidechains have similar address formats as Ethereum and support similar Ethereum assets, but they are different. For example, Layer 2 sidechains run alongside the Ethereum mainnet but not directly on it, like ERC20 tokens. Coinbase only provides Layer-2 network support and asset recovery for select networks and assets.