I’ve learned a few important lessons while using a crypto exchange to play a bit with crypto trading, and I hope sharing my experience can help others.

The exchange I’ve been using supports various types of coins, but, with all the crypto coin forks recently, some of them are being discontinued from this exchange since they no longer exist. This is the case with Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) which was rebranded to eCash. The token’s addresses are the same, but the coin and wallet address are now different. I was notified by the exchange that they are ending support for BCHA wallets, and I should withdraw all the tokens there or lose access to them.

I started to look into my options.

First, I checked my Ledger Live and Ledger Nano S to see if they are supporting BCHA. I went to Accounts and found one result while looking for BCHA, but it seemed a bit suspicious. Would this work?

I installed the account, added it to the Ledger, among many other things needed, until I was finally able to create a wallet address.

I still wasn’t confident enough to transfer the tokens from the exchange to a wallet that may or may not work. Not to mention that every transfer would take a small portion of the very small funds I had there. Moreover, this wallet was only accepting BNB or BEP20 tokens, making the next question clear, “Which kind of tokens are BCHA?”

I had to do a bit of Googling to try to get to an answer and found that it is incredibly hard to uncover this kind of information. While searching, I discovered this page, which describes the BCHA renaming and explains that all I needed to do was create an eCash wallet address and transfer my tokens there. It said they will be converted to eCash tokens directly once received.

Nice. What can go wrong?

Setting it all up sounded easy: get an eCash wallet in Ledger and transfer all the funds there. However, there were two possible accounts with the same abbreviation, which made me doubt if these were valid wallets to store eCash tokens.

Back to Google. With more searching I found out that Ledger has no support for eCash or BCHA, as it is susceptible to some attacks. At this point, I had no choice. I needed to get a compatible wallet from here, set up a new wallet address in eCash, and send the tokens there. I installed the wallet and generated a new address in the receive tokens area.

ecash:[something]

I went to the exchange, clicked withdrawal, and put the address there.

**Message: “This isn’t a valid BCHA address.”

Cue my frustration.**

Back again to Google, where I learned that I needed to make use of an eCash wallet app address converter to transform the provided eCash wallet address to receive tokens into a bitcoincash one. I tried sending the tokens from the exchange to my new address and…I’ve finally made it! eCash tokens were now in my new wallet address.

So, what did I learn when a crypto exchange ended support for a wallet?

1. Alt coins are really hard to store and manage and are more susceptible to forks.
2. Staying up-to-date on forks and coin updates requires a lot of time.
3. The current solutions are confusing and require advanced knowledge to navigate.

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