Ethereum is a public blockchain, with its own cryptocurrency, called Ether, or Ethereum. Like a lot of other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has gone through some important changes since its inception and has a few key concepts that are unique to it.
To ensure that you’re able to correctly transact Ethereum with Luno, you’ll need to understand what GAS, ERC20 and the EIP55 standard are. Let’s get into it!
What is GAS
Gas is a price unit used in the completion of Ethereum transactions. It measures the amount of work an action on the Ethereum blockchain is required to perform.
When it comes to paying for gas, the transaction fee is charged in the form of an amount of ether, which is used to compensate miners for block production.
Tip
To get a better understanding of GAS fees and how they’re calculated, have a look at this article on Luno Discover.
Is there a minimum Gas limit when sending ETH to my Luno wallet?
Yes. Luno receive addresses require a minimum of ~32k gas to ensure that your ETH is successfully and promptly received to your Luno wallet.
Sending ETH to a Luno receive address with less than ~32k gas will result in a failed transaction, in which case the ETH will be returned to the sender.
Note
The gas used is unrecoverable - please contact the wallet provider you're sending from for further details.
ERC20 and the dangers of sending them to Luno
ERC-20 tokens are sets of fungible digital tokens that live on the Ethereum network. Although they are connected and form part of the Ethereum network, ERC20 tokens are not supported by your Luno Ethereum address.
Receiving any unsupported cryptocurrency, such as ERC20 tokens to your Luno ETH wallet, will result in the loss of those tokens.
Note
Luno is unable to recover any unsupported cryptocurrency or tokens sent to your receive address.
The reason for this is because Luno customer ETH receive addresses are very simple smart contracts only designed to forward ETH to Luno’s internal wallets. They’re not designed to support ERC20 tokens. Since it’s a smart contract, the private key does not exist, making recovering ERC20 tokens impossible.
What are EIP55 compatible addresses and why do they matter?
EIP55 is a checksum standard that was created to ensure that wallet addresses contain a mix of both capitalized and lowercase letters.
What exactly is a checksum? A checksum is a small error-detection function that you can add to anything to verify it was not tampered with, ultimately improving its security.
When you’re looking at Ethereum wallet addresses, you’ll notice that they have a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, whereas other times they consist of lowercase letters only. The reason for this is that there are two types of Ethereum addresses: Checksummed addresses and Legacy addresses.
Here are examples of each type:
Checksummed addresses: 0x416299AAde6443e6F6e8ab67126e65a7F606eeF5
Legacy addresses: 0x416299aade6443e6f6e8ab67126e65a7f606eef5
Both of these examples represent the same address, however, the difference is that the checksummed address contains mixed-case characters while the legacy address is lowercase only.
Note
For safety reasons, we only accept checksummed addresses, so you may get an error message when attempting to use non-checksummed addresses.
To change a legacy address to a checksummed address, simply follow the steps below:
Copy the wallet address you want to send to
Open https://etherscan.io
Paste the address in the search bar on the top right-hand side of the screen and click search
The wallet address is now displayed as a valid EIP55 address - with upper and lower case letters
Copy the wallet address, paste it back into the Luno app, and hit send