How are ERC20 tokens, Ethereum and BNB BSC, Polygon, HECO (and other ETH clones) related?

Modified on Fri, 18 Mar 2022 at 10:18 AM

All ERC20 tokens reside on Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and thus your ETH wallet. This means, that you will see your ETH wallet address (all of them if you have many) under every ERC20 wallet. 


For example if you have ETH Wallet named "My ETH Wallet" with Address "0x1234567....ABCD" you will see this same wallet under each ERC20 token you have (in example below USDT, LINK and SAND). There is no need to create extra wallet for each ERC20 token. You can have them all sitting in this one wallet.



If you decide that you will also create a new ERC20 token wallet named for example "My ERC20 Token Wallet" you will create ETH wallet and also see this new wallet under ETH and all ERC20 tokens.


Take a note that when you are sending ERC20 token, you have to have ETH balance in your ETH wallet with same address you are sending tokens from, as you will pay transaction fee (Gas) in ETH.


Below you can see that both "My ETH Wallet" and "My ERC20 Token Wallet" are both visible under ETH and all ERC20 Token definitions. They have same name and same wallet addresses under both:


Ethereum Wallets:



Custom ERC20 Token (MKR) Wallets:



L2 Ethereum blockchain "clones"


Now to further "complicate" things we also have blockchains/networks as BNB BSC, HECO, Polygon...that are basically Ethereum clones. This means they use same principles as Ethereum. The relationship can be best explained with the following picture:


As you can see the complete aspect of the Ethereum wallets is simply copied over to other blockchains/networks! If you use same private key for the wallets sitting on this different networks, your address will also stay the same!

Of course funds on different networks will be different, even if you use the same wallet address/private key (via BC Vault copy wallet function).


See also: Copy wallets from Ethereum to other Ethereum clones (BNB BSC, HECO, Polygon...)

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