BTC send accidentally to BCH Address

[raykobg81]

Hello,

I made a stupid mistake - send BTC from GDAX account to my BCH Kraken account, is there a way to recover my funds ( I emailed both exchanges but usually takes days for their support to reply)

[cellard]

Hello,

I made a stupid mistake - send BTC from GDAX account to my BCH Kraken account, is there a way to recover my funds ( I emailed both exchanges but usually takes days for their support to reply)

This is a very usual mistake by newbies, but mostly thanks to BCash using the exact same format address (that is, both BTC and BCash addresses begin with 1 and are exactly the same looking).

Now, what are the chances you ever recover your money? they are rather low, in fact, I don't even know if it can be done. In this case, you would need to contact Kraken. But im not sure if it's even possible. I mean, it's 2 different blockchains. You sent coins from blockchain 1, into blockchain 2. BTC cannot go into BCH back and forth... only at the beginning of the fork when the addresses matched, you could access your BCH through a BTC address... correct me if im wrong, but you can't recover the coins.

In theory, your coins are sitting on the BTC blockchain in the same address you sent the BCH to. So who owns the private keys of these? if im not mistaken, nobody does.

[LoyceV]

Once confirmed, GDAX can't help you.
Kraken can, but they show this:


This is what Kraken answered to someone who sent them 14.2 Bitcoin Cash (currently worth over $40k) in August:

"You are absolutely correct about us possessing the private keys in this circumstance. That being said, it isn't as straight forward as you might think. Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange and the nature of cryptocurrency exchanges are wholly different from the experience you might have with a personal wallet where you have easy access to the private keys. With things like the theft of Mt Gox, the internal compromise of Shapeshift, the social engineering of BitPay, and others, we must put security as the paramount concern. As such, our exchange is setup in such a way that nobody within Kraken can unilaterally move funds. We believe that this is a very important protection that makes it extremely difficult for client funds to be stolen by external or internal parties.

Only a very small group of people at Kraken (devs) have the ability to access your funds given an auditable thorough process of checks and balances. This makes the process extremely resource (time) intensive for the devs that have very full plates and very little time to dedicate to any specific task. They must prioritize all of our tasks internally and the requests of clients as best they can. We think that the prioritization of improving our UI/UX as to avoid these type of mistakes will show the greatest dividends for our clients."

I understand their reasoning, but the amount of money lost keeps increasing. In the future, with enough public pressure, maybe it becomes possible for exchanges to recover cross-chain-deposits once a year. On a specific day, they outphase all deposit addresses, start using new ones, and after some time to overlap, the old private keys can be sold to the account owners if they want to recover anything from other chains.

In theory, your coins are sitting on the BTC blockchain in the same address you sent the BCH to. So who owns the private keys of these? if im not mistaken, nobody does.

Kraken owns the private keys, both chains can use the same address, and they come from the same private key.

[raykobg81]

Thank you both for the thorough replies, LoyceV  do you know if this person recovered his funds from Kraken ? the amount I send is over a bitcoin, so it is quite a lot......

[LoyceV]

Thank you both for the thorough replies, LoyceV  do you know if this person recovered his funds from Kraken ? the amount I send is over a bitcoin, so it is quite a lot......

He has only 3 posts and never said he recovered his money.

I know another exchange (Bittrex) charges 0.1BTC, and only recovers amounts >$5k. As far as I know, Kraken doesn't do it at (yet).

[raykobg81]

I just received the below reply from Kraken Customer Service, I guess not much to do at the moment and just wait..... Any suggestions ?

Hi,

Thank you very much for your email. We are very sorry to hear that you sent these assets to the wrong address.
At Kraken, we do what we can to prevent these mistakes from happening. That's why we make sure that our deposit page contains a warning and acknowledgement that Kraken is not responsible for these mistakes.

In this case we have decided that we are going to make an exception to our general policy of not recovering crypto tokens that have been sent to the wrong address and assist you with the recovery. However, our developers, who are required to recover the funds for you, are very busy at the moment.

We will have to ask you to wait a minimum of 90 days until the recovery can be attempted. These efforts will take time and may not be possible in some cases. We will give you an update only after the recovery has been completed. Please be patient as our team works to resolve your issue.

Thanks a lot for understanding!

[cellard]

In theory, your coins are sitting on the BTC blockchain in the same address you sent the BCH to. So who owns the private keys of these? if im not mistaken, nobody does.

Kraken owns the private keys, both chains can use the same address, and they come from the same private key.

So you can send transactions from the BTC blockchain to the BCH blockchain back and forth? that's pretty weird. I thought the private keys would be different for each chain, and it's just 2 different networks... I can't say I can get my head around this.

I just received the below reply from Kraken Customer Service, I guess not much to do at the moment and just wait..... Any suggestions ?

Hi,

Thank you very much for your email. We are very sorry to hear that you sent these assets to the wrong address.
At Kraken, we do what we can to prevent these mistakes from happening. That's why we make sure that our deposit page contains a warning and acknowledgement that Kraken is not responsible for these mistakes.

In this case we have decided that we are going to make an exception to our general policy of not recovering crypto tokens that have been sent to the wrong address and assist you with the recovery. However, our developers, who are required to recover the funds for you, are very busy at the moment.

We will have to ask you to wait a minimum of 90 days until the recovery can be attempted. These efforts will take time and may not be possible in some cases. We will give you an update only after the recovery has been completed. Please be patient as our team works to resolve your issue.

Thanks a lot for understanding!

Seems like you are lucky and they may return your funds. Next time, triple check before making a transaction, and be sure you are not sending it into a BCH transaction, or just use bc1 segwit transactions when they are available, so you don't get confused with BCash.

[LoyceV]

I just received the below reply from Kraken Customer Service, I guess not much to do at the moment and just wait..... Any suggestions ?

How about just being very, very thankful if they recover your funds?

Thank you very much for your email. We are very sorry to hear that you sent these assets to the wrong address.
At Kraken, we do what we can to prevent these mistakes from happening. That's why we make sure that our deposit page contains a warning and acknowledgement that Kraken is not responsible for these mistakes.

In this case we have decided that we are going to make an exception to our general policy of not recovering crypto tokens that have been sent to the wrong address and assist you with the recovery. However, our developers, who are required to recover the funds for you, are very busy at the moment.

We will have to ask you to wait a minimum of 90 days until the recovery can be attempted. These efforts will take time and may not be possible in some cases. We will give you an update only after the recovery has been completed. Please be patient as our team works to resolve your issue.

Just be patient, don't bother them with follow up questions for at least 120 days, and consider yourself very lucky!

My guess is they'll "batch" your transaction with other requests, and do them all at once (maybe every 6 months or so). Considering the amount of work but also the amount of money involved, I think this is a fair solution.

So you can send transactions from the BTC blockchain to the BCH blockchain back and forth?

No, not really. Both blockchains are different chains (since the fork), but they can use the same addresses and hence the same private keys.

that's pretty weird. I thought the private keys would be different for each chain, and it's just 2 different networks... I can't say I can get my head around this.

Right after the fork you could use the same address and private key to send coins on both chains. That's still possible now. I think you're overthinking it. At least Bitcoin Cash has replay protection, so the same transaction doesn't end up on both chains. Other than that, the basics are the same on both chains.
Although it's theoretically possible to have the same address with different private keys (as there are much more private keys than addresses), the chances of finding them are small enough to be impossible.

[TrumpD]

Jeez, I hope you don't need the funds anytime soon OP? Having used Kraken for years without issues, I'd say just wait and it will be resolved. 3 months may seem like forever, but you are very lucky indeed that there is a chance to recover the funds. Hopefully your experience will serve as a lesson to others who could make similar mistakes.

[thetractor666]

Hello,

I made a stupid mistake - send BTC from GDAX account to my BCH Kraken account, is there a way to recover my funds ( I emailed both exchanges but usually takes days for their support to reply)

Sadly there is no way back and your coins are lost. No idea were but they'r lost.

[TrumpD]

Hello,

I made a stupid mistake - send BTC from GDAX account to my BCH Kraken account, is there a way to recover my funds ( I emailed both exchanges but usually takes days for their support to reply)

Sadly there is no way back and your coins are lost. No idea were but they'r lost.

All is not lost as clearly stated by the message Kraken sent them. You should read the entire thread.