CoinPayments, a crypto payment gateway, appears to have discovered a radical new approach to media relations: when a journalist asks for a press contact, send them to the legal department.
A customer told Daily Goat that he accidentally sent BNB on the Ethereum network instead of BSC while paying through CoinPayments.
Support’s solution? Pay 0.02 ETH (about $90) up front for a “manual recovery” — a flat figure the company insists is its “standard gas fee”, regardless of what the Ethereum network is actually charging at the time.
Crypto payments cost different amounts on different networks, with Ethereum charging at the upper end for transfers. Still, standard peer-to-peer transfers on Ethereum cost nowhere near the amount of money CoinPayments is charging.
Tranfers on the Ethereum blockchain cost around $1.30. That means that CoinPayments is charging a whopping 75 times the cost of a standard transfer with no explanation.
But CoinPayments’ own User Agreement says that if you send funds to the wrong chain and they have to recover them manually, “there will be a recovery fee equal to 50 United States of America dollars (USD50).”
That’s not an asterisk, a footnote or a “from” price — it’s right there in black and white.
When the customer pointed this out to the payment gateway, support replied that $50 was merely a “minimum” and that the “standard gas fee remains 0.02 ETH for ERC-20 transactions.”
That's odd, because not only is it not the charge on chain but the $50 line is written as the recovery fee for exactly this scenario, while “Rejected Payments” live elsewhere in the Ts & Cs.
To clarify whether the company really does charge more than its own contract says, DG asked for a press office contact.
We received a reply directing us to legal@uabsv.com — the legal team tied to CoinPayments’ EU arm — who, we’re assured, “will be able to help.” A media strategy so streamlined that PR has been replaced with pre-litigation.
For extra seasoning, third-party developer documentas have long repeated the magic number 0.02 ETH as CoinPayments’ recommended float for ERC-20 gas — which may explain where support got the idea it’s a law of physics rather than a choice. But “recommended wallet float” and “customer recovery fee for a wrong-network send” are, as the boffins say, different things.
If your own contract says $50, charging a floating 0.02 ETH because it’s “standard” looks, at best, like policy creep. At worst, it’s charging more than the agreement allows and hoping customers won’t read the bit labelled “6.3.”
Daily Goat asked CoinPayments’ legal department (which apparently doubles as their press office) to confirm whether the 0.02 ETH demand is official policy, and why it differs from the $50 stated in their own terms. They were given until Monday 8pm CET to reply. That deadline came and went but reply came there none.
N.B. - If you have any stories relating to this company good or bad. send them over. If the legal department ever get back to us, we will be happy to update with their reply.