SmolRefuel

Get your tokens out of addresses with 0 ETH

TLDR:

• SmolRefuel is a slick little tool that helps you swap tokens even when you don’t have any ETH for gas in your wallet.

• As helpful as this tool is, it reminds us how easy it is for you to sign away your money in transactions. Make sure to use tools like Pocket Universe to stay safe.

This week I’m travelling!

So instead of having no post, I decided to just do a small post on a very cool tool I found last week that can help you fish out tokens from EVM addresses without any ETH to pay for gas!

Credits to 0xngmi for creating this. He’s the founder of DeFiLlama, which we covered last week.

The Problem

Anyone who’s active in Web3 long enough will probably had a moment where they get their tokens stuck in an address without enough ETH to transfer it out.

This can happen for example when you receive an airdrop into an emptied out wallet, or friends send you money, or if you just mistakenly send money to an address without enough ETH.

When you check on etherscan you’ll see something like this.

Often the only way to then remove those tokens is to send some ETH in to fish the tokens out. This isn’t a huge problem, but it’s awkward and annoying, especially since there’s already enough money in that account, the problem is you just don’t have enough ETH to pay for gas.

The Solution - SmolRefuel

DeFiLlama founder 0xngmi made a cool little tool called SmolRefuel that’s super simple to use.

Connect your wallet to the site and pick the network then the coin you want to swap. In this case I had ARB on my Arbitrum One account but no ETH. So I selected to convert all the ARB into ETH.

After selecing “Convert to ETH”, you’ll just be asked to sign once to give SmolRefuel approval to move your tokens, and on the other side you’ll get the ETH immediately!

It makes use of the “permit” function, which most tokens have, and it keeps the swap limits small to below $1k to limit potential losses, hence why it’s called “smol” refuel!

If you want to learn more you can find 0xngmi’s tweet on it here.

Pretty simple and really powerful. You’ll never have to bridge in ETH to fish out orphaned tokens again.

Conclusion

This reminds me of revoke.cash and delegate.cash as it’s a small tool that just gives a “quality of life” type of benefit to using Web3.

These small little projects are building blocks that eventually can lead to just much greater usability of Web3. A smart UX designer will connect this up to a button on a wallet interface and give users a much slicker experience.

One thing to note from this though is how surprisingly easy it can be to sign away your money to hackers. So as always be super careful when signing transactions and make sure to use something like Pocket Universe or similar to protect yourself!

As always, stay safe out there.