Coinbase commerce and their fees

Mots · Nov 3, 2021

Edit as of 09/03/2022:
They lowered their "transaction fee's" and instead added higher fee's to their own "processing fee's".
If you keep on using the method below this means your balance will become negative on coinbase commerce:

Not to be alarmed, cause your account is still using the private key so the method still works. Also it seems to only take the minus on the balance of LTC and BTC for which this method is viable, for coins such as ETH or BCC if people pay with those it's recommended to just withdraw using their own feature because the negative balance is only on BTC and LTC:

For any mercher that has been using coinbase commerce in the past years have probably noticed in the past month or so they have added a new fee to their system.

Ontop of this they already have a base network fee which is thru the roof if you happen to compare it to mempool.space or blockchair.

Well I would like to enlighten the poor souls who have been using this system and have been paying these dumb fee's by giving them the following trick:
If you have setup coinbase commerce with where you keep your own secret phrase, you can export these into electrum wallets.

This used to also work with wallets such as exodus, but since 2019-2020 they chaged their setup so this no longer worked and you now can only do this within electrum with some tweaks to the wallet setup.

This will only work and will only be usefull in general for anything not on the ERC20 network, so mainly BTC and LTC (which is where I'll be explaining this for).

Firstly you'll need to download electrum for each coin:
BTC - Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
LTC - https://electrum-ltc.org/

Then I'll explain step by step how to import your 12 word phrase and also configure your wallet to show all of your coins which are in your coinbase commerce:

1. Once electrum is open you'll have to create a new wallet by first giving it a random name.
2. Select "standard wallet"
3. select "I already have a seed"
4. on the next screen you'll have to put in your 12 word secret phrase, for anybody who does not know this: If you share this 12 word phrase with anybody they will have access to your coins no mather what. DO NOT SHARE THIS WITH ANYBODY.
on the same screen you have to go to options and select "BIP 39 seed".
5. Next screen option you need to select "p2sh-segwit"
Now field below depends on what electrum you are working with and what coin you want to import.
For LTC use the following derivative : m/44'/2'/0'
For BTC use the following derivative : m/44'/0'/0'
6. lastly you will be prompted to choose a password, it's importent to know that this password isn't put on your 12 word phrase. This is purely put on the application itself once you select that wallet the next time you turn on electrum. So consider this password to be locally used when somebody tries to open up electrum on your PC.

Now it will open up electrum, if this opens and will show 0 coins or a fraction of what you have on your commerce then don't be scared cause this is normal. For the next step I'll explain how to show the full value and why it currently doesn't show the full amount. If you purely want to configure it and don't want my boring read go down untill you see step 7 .
The way coinbase commerce works is, everytime a customers creates an order request, commerce creates a new address so it can keep track of that single order. This means that if the customer didn't send any crypto to that address it will still have created that address.
The reason why exodus and other importable wallets don't show your full balance or any balance at all from commerce is because it only checks X amounts of addresses before it quits looking for coins. This means if you have 100 unnused addresses before the coins show up, these wallets won't know they exist, in electrum we will set it up so it will search for X amounts of addresses before giving up.

Now to continue with the setup:
7. On the top bar in electrum to go "view" and select "view console"
8. go to the newly created console tab and in here we will put the following command:
wallet.change_gap_limit(10000)
The number 10000 is just a random number, you can put a lower number here or a higher depending on howlong you have already been using commerce for. Personally before exporting to electrum I had been using commerce as is for almost 3 years so when I imported it I used a gap_limit of 20000.
The higher gap limit you use, the longer it will take for the wallet to synchronise. It's best to just let the application do and do not touch it or play in the settings while it's doing this because it can crash (not respond) and you will have to restart the sync.

After step 8 the wallet will go and search for any addresses that has any coins and any search history.

It's possible that after it is done synchronising you will end up with more coins! This is possible if a customer ever send a payment with such a low fee it took weeks to be confirmed, and once confirmed it bugged out of commerce.
If after step 8 you still have less coins as in commerce, you can always try to increase the gap limit to as much as possible, do know this can take very long and it's best not to touch the program at all once it's synchronising as it may crash and you will have to resync it.

Thanks for the read, hope this will help people out