Withdrawing Ethereum (ETH) to Metamask With L2 Protocols (Polygon & Crypto.com App)

If you’re anything like me, a part of you dies every time you need to transfer ether (ETH) from an exchange like Crypto.com to a browser wallet like MetaMask to interact with DeFi projects or whatever the case may be.

In this article, we’ll be talking about how to actually use Crypto.com and transfer the ether and reduce your fees by 98%! Using layer two protocols to actually make the transfer. Part of Crypto.com, there is a way to actually move ether on the polygon network, and there are a bunch of different options.

We’ll be mostly talking about polygon as an example and how to actually set it up so that you’re not paying exorbitant fees. If you’re using another centralized exchange (that has a similar feature) and transferring ether to MetaMask, it may not work the same exact way (but is probably similar). Once you’re in the Crypto.com app, you go into the Ethereum wallet, go down and click on transfer.

What we’re going to do is withdraw ETH to an external wallet. And this is where you’re going to go and set up the wallet address that you’re withdrawing to (Metamask for this example). I have a MetaMask for my ERC 20 and also a polygon MetaMask, which is just the polygon network on my MetaMask.

When I withdraw it to the ERC 20 wallet the fees are going to be higher. Let’s say I withdrew 0.01 ETH to the ERC wallet, it’s a fee of 0.005 ETH.

If we go back to the polygon MetaMask that we set up and withdraw ETH, it would end up being wrapped ETH (WETH) in our MetaMask. If you did the same withdrawal of 0.01 ETH, the fee would only be 0.0001 ETH versus 0.005. A 98% reduction in your fees!

If you’re holding ETH on Crypto.com and you want to use it as WETH on a DeFi project this is how you would withdraw it.

When you go back to the actual wallet and go to this little plus sign and add a wallet address, you’ll see that you have other options such tas ERC 20, BSC, Arbitrum, AVAXC, Cronos, and then Polygon (which is what we chose for this example).

Let’s talk about how you’d go ahead and  set up one of these networks on MetaMask. When we actually make that withdrawal, we are withdrawing it using the matic mainnet. First of all, if you have MetaMask, you have to set up your Matic mainnet and you do that simply by going to settings networks and adding a network.

Here is the URL, chain ID, MATIC symbol, as well as the block Explorer that you can use as it’s going to be the same for everyone.

If you want to copy the same information you can, and this is how you add the network.

When you go back and look at what’s in the wallet after transferring you should have wrapped ETH in your polygon wallet (which doesn’t automatically appear in MetaMask automatically). You actually have to import tokens to have the WETH pop up in the wallet.

To do this you need to look at the contract address of wrapped ether. You’d go to something like polygon scan, look at this contract and you’d copy this address.

Go back to MetaMask wallet, you would go down to import tokens. You would copy in that contract address that we just looked up and paste it. Once you put that into the token address the rest of the fields will populate (simply click the add custom token to finish).

You should see the wrapped ETH in your wallet now!

And if you’re wondering which DeFi projects are running on polygon, and where you can use that wrapped ETH you would just simply go on something like DeFi Lama, look at the polygon chain to see what projects are on it. Something like sushi swap has the polygon network integrated.

Once on sushi swap, you would connect your wallet. You would come down here, click on WETH or wrapped ether and you’ll see the balance there.

You can then swap it for whatever currency that you’re looking to swap.

This connecting of wallet and being able to interact should work with any DeFi project that allows wrapped ETH.

This is above process shows you how to avoid the high fees that you would experience transacting directly in Ethereum versus a layer two protocol!

Of course, this article is only talking about crypto.com, but if there is any centralized exchange that says they offer withdrawals that aren’t necessarily on the Ethereum network, this is what they’re talking about. It’s probably a very similar process with the fees being much lower than sending directly on the mainnet of Ethereum.

Cause I know some people out there may take their ETH on an exchange, sell it for another coin, then transfer it to MetaMask to interact with DeFi.

The above process keeps it simple with fewer transactions 🙂

This article was generated from the following Youtube Video: