As you may know from my recent articles, I'm in the middle of transferring a chunk of my funds away from Binance. That means thinking about everyone's favourite topic, network fees - or gas fees as they are usually called. And Binance is less than clear on that front, to the point of being actively misleading. Here's what it says versus what I think it means.

On Binance, when you click 'withdraw' and enter your withdrawal address and network, the platform will calculate the network fee. The fee of course varies from network to network. And next to the fee amount, there's a little tool tip ('i' icon)that says this when you hover over it:

The unclear bit, I think, is:

"Withdrawal fees are returned to Binance deposit addresses. Fee will be returned to: Withdraw account"

After all, it says not once but twice that withdrawal fees are returned (rather than lost).

A quick Google shows this is a point of confusion for quite a few people out there. There's even a thread on Reddit where one Redditor confidently tells another that they will have had their fees refunded. Spoiler alert - I don't agree.

The key to this mystery can be found by clicking the orange 'Change' link in that tool tip we saw earlier. You'll then be given the option to choose between "Fee is returned to the withdrawal account" or "Fee is returned to the receiving account" - but only when you "Use internal transfer":

If you swap over to "Transfer through blockchain", there's no such option. Instead, it warns you:

"Your assets will be sent to the destination address via the selected blockchain and you will pay the transfer fees associated with that blockchain for the transfer."

I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of withdrawals from Binance are via the blockchain rather than via internal transfer to another Binance user. So in most cases, gas fees will need to be paid. Certainly that was the case with my ADA transfer from the first image in this article. I withdrew 88.94 ADA, was told to expect a 0.8 ADA fee, and 88.14 ADA arrived at its destination:

Perhaps that Binance tool tip should have said "Fees will be returned if the withdrawal is made to another Binance address". Although even that is slightly misleading: an internal transfer doesn't take place on the blockchain so there ARE no network fees! And if there are no fees, how can fees be returned? "Internal transfers to other Binance addresses are exempt from fees" might be better.

So long story short... if you are withdrawing your funds from Binance and think you might be exempt from fees, sadly that's not the case - whatever the platform might imply.