Recovering ETH sent to a Coinbase CELO address

Mainnet
1

Hey,

Earlier this year, I accidentally sent some Ethereum from Binance to my Celo Coinbase address instead of my Ethereum Coinbase address. I’ve noticed that there is documentation here for how to recover from this kind of mistake: Recover ETH or ERC-20 tokens from a Celo address | Celo Documentation. However, I don’t have the 24-word recovery phrase for my Celo address, since it’s managed by Coinbase.

I’ve reached out to Coinbase and they claim that they can’t recover the funds:

Coinbase operates as a hosted-wallet service, meaning that all addresses we provide are for depositing funds only. All funds held on Coinbase are stored in Coinbase’s internal wallets. As a result, the specific private keys associated with an address are not available to any single person.

Maintaining and prioritizing the security of our private keys is our top priority. Therefore, we’re not able to provide our private keys as these wallets are used to hold funds for all customers across Coinbase.

I understand that they can’t provide me with the recovery phrases if they’re storing other people’s funds in the same wallet, but as far as I understand, they could still recover my funds for me without compromising security if they really wanted to since they do have the recovery phrases. Is this assumption correct?

Do you have any other ideas on how I can recover these funds?

2

Sorry to hear. It must feel frustrating to not be able to access your funds. You’ll need to contact Coinbase customer support to see if they can help.

3

Hey Claire,

Thanks, I have already reached out to Coinbase and have included their response in the post above. I understand if there’s nothing the CELO community can do about this, but I was curious if you think Coinbase’s rationale makes sense for not helping me out or had any suggestions for what I can say to them to get them to help?