Dust.
You have it all around your house no matter how much you clean. But we're not talking about your sloughing skin matter (yes, that is in fact what most dust involves in the physical world). We're talking about crypto dust. Those fragments of a coin that end up in your digital wallet from transactions because, no matter how much you try to be exact about how you receive and spend crypto, some small, minuscule portion always gets left in your digital wallet or exchange account.
Dust is a result of decimal level business math being applied by computers. While we see coins in terms of something closer to an integer (whole numbers), computers run transactions out to a couple dozen decimals at least. Blockchain is no exception. As coins transaction, they are spilling little digital bits of themselves all over the place. Some of it is simply due to the constantly changing valuation from one point of a transaction to another. Other bits are consolidations of leftovers that, like dust bunnies on your floor, eventually get big enough to be seen and rolled into bigger transactions. When that happens, dust to some extent disappears. It gets absorbed. However, in a lot of other cases, it just sits doing nothing but taking up data in your wallet.
Most exchanges tend to give users the ability to not see small account balances. The coin is still there but, with a toggle, it disappears from view. Kucoin and Coinbase both do this, but it's just salad dressing functionally.
Binance, however, came up with a nice little feature, not to mention a bit of extra fee revenue for themselves. Instead of your account on their platform having lots of entries for useless coins, you as the user get the option to sweep all that dust of various types into a Binance coin (BNB) exchange. It's pretty handy for wiping out small account balances quickly. A user can use this tool every 6 hours, but most folks will benefit from it maybe once a week or once a month.
Why does dust matter in the big picture, though? It depends where you are operating. On social media sites like Discord, for example, dust gets thrown around a lot with drops and tipping. And, over time, it can start to add up. Now, we're not talking about breaking the bank with a $100,000 sweep. Instead, it's more like maybe $0.30 a day at best. That said, if you're just mildly picking things up while you're listening to yet another boring zoom meeting at work or school, it can begin to add up.
On average, I'm sweeping Discord dust everyday. I will collect anywhere from $0.50 to $2.00 a day, aside from everything else I do, on Discord dust. I then pick a coin that I know has minimal or no fees to transfer from my Discord wallet to my real digital accounts. Once I know what's working, then I start finding a swap server and I convert all my larger dust balances over to that single coin type and transfer out. My two big ones due to no fees are Banano (BAN) or Wax (WAXP). Either work just fine if you are working on those networks. Nano (NANO) is another one as well as Polygon (MATIC). Finally, there is Litecoin (LTC), but the fees per transfer are bit higher in cost.
Again, this isn't Lives of the Rich & Famous here, but dust in aggregate starts to become real money if you apply your otherwise wasted time to it. Most is simple to capture on Discord with just a mobile device. When bored or waiting, just check servers known for dropping dust of various coins and collect. It's literally free money. After a week or so, cash it out, and convert your balances to your exit coin.
Wash-rinse-repeat.
