Ripple (XRP) Wallet to Wallet Transfer – January 2018

My Ethereum (ETH) coins were already in the Poloniex exchange, which is located in the US so I didn’t have to worry about that for now. One coin that I could transfer out from Binance to Poloniex though was Ripple (XRP) since both exchanges trade it, so I did go about doing that.

‘ID Tag’
My transfer did hit a snag as when I tried to do it the first time, the Withdrawal menu on Binance was asking for an Identification (ID) Tag aside from the just the wallet address (like on most other coins) which I could not find on the Poloniex Deposit details.

After doing a bit of research, I found that some exchanges like Bitfinex and Binance require their users to use these ID Tags when making XRP deposits to their exchanges and even putting out warnings that any transfer would be lost if no ID tag information was included in the transfer.

However, for some reason Poloniex did not have this requirement, and the Binance withdrawal menu did offer an option to use a “No Tag” transfer. So I decided to try transferring a small amount first, around 23 XRP units which is just above the minimum withdrawal limit on Binance.

I made the transfer, and I expected it to be fast since that was how XRP is supposed to work since it is supposed to be a “fast” coin. After 10-15 minutes though there was nothing yet so I opened up a Support Ticket on Poloniex providing them with the Transaction ID details from Binance.

After 15 minutes I noticed that the transfer did push thru even if I got no response from the Poloniex Support group yet, so I went out and just cancelled the ticket. This is the second time that this happened with me on Poloniex wherein I open a ticket and the problem just sorts of disappears on its own even with no response from their support group.

The problem just goes away, like “magic”, LOL. After the successful first transfer, I went out and transferred the rest of my XRP from Binance to Poloniex.

‘Transaction Time and Fees’
The second transfer took only three minutes, which is closer to my expectation of the performance of a newer coin such as XRP. In terms of costs, I had to pay Binance a fee of 0.25 XRP units for each transaction, and when the units arrived at Poloniex they charged me an additional 0.33-0.4 XRP.

So the total fees for each transaction was around 0.58-0.65 XRP which translated to around USD 0.68-0.78 at the exchange rate of USD 1.17-1.20 for the XRP at the time of the transfer. However, there is a catch: A fee of 20 XRP is made everytime a new wallet is created which is non-withdrawable.

Some coins do this, but others don’t like with Bitcoin (BTC), for example, no such fees are charged to the user, you can withdraw all of it anytime you want. On the coins that do charge fees like this, the fees varies like with Stellar (XLM) it used to be 20 XLM also but they reduced it to just 1 XLM recently.

It is possible that XRP will lower the cost of each wallet in the future so I can get some if not all of the deposited XRP back, but for now at current prices, each time you open an XRP wallet it will cost you at least USD 20.

In my case I felt it was worth it for some peace of mind, and hopefully I can get those coins back later one way or the other.

‘Parting Shot’
Transferring XRP from one wallet to another has been complicated and full of issues, and it was relatively expensive, too. The only advantage XRP has over BTC was the speed, but that was only after the issue was resolved somehow.

Compare this to my experience with transferring XLM which was almost painless and cost free as I posted before. Of course XRP was designed mainly for bank to bank transfers and not necessarily for personal transfers, but the way I see it, their product does need a lot of improvement to make it easier and cheaper to use.